Visible Measures Blog

We were really happy to be highlighted in Joshua Chaffin’s Financial Times piece last month focusing on online video advertising. It was great exposure for us and for the burgeoning field of online video measurement.

During the interview Joshua asked us about initial attention (also referred to as initial abandonment) -- how many online viewers drop off at the very beginning of a video -- across all online videos. We had done some analysis across our aggregated data set (which is small but growing by the moment!) and found that, for our early adopter customers, the average initial attention has been around 30%. Not surprisingly, the distribution of initial attention across our customers is fairly diverse. This means that, in general, for every 100 people who start watching a video, 30 of them leave the video at the outset. Wow.

This speaks to how online viewers consumer video content: leaning forward, hand on the mouse, and ready to click away at any time. If the video doesn’t deliver what the viewer wants or expects in the first few seconds, he or she splits and moves on. And if the product or brand wasn’t in those first few seconds, the viewer never sees it and may have no idea it was part of the video. That's wasted dollars for both publishers and advertisers... and that’s painful.

We think that one way to soothe this pain lies in tracking viewer engagement in your online video content. The act of measuring initial attention will show you just how important the beginning of a video truly is... and over time you'll be able to identify the elements of clip composition and merchandising that positive and negatively affect initial attention.

We're digging through our data every day and, from time to time, will share any gems that are worthy of your attention. ;)