Attention!
As we all know the web is not a place to indulge fully. People scan websites instead of reading them. And even if they read a large part their attention wanders off after a while and they either leave the site or switch to some other article. This is how the modern world works and it’s now common also in newspapers, magazines and other non-digital media. Except for books maybe but they’re beginning to be less and less popular unfortunately. Which makes our imaginations want more digitized fast paced action or we get bored. So basically the wheel goes round and round.
Sampling
So we sample the content to satisfy our information hunger. Of course this does not apply to things we are wanting to see in the first place – those we usually see to the end. I did a couple of tests on my friends (sorry guys!) and I’ve noticed that giving them youtube access and about an hour to play with it they only watched roughly 25% videos in full. That proves that 3/4 of the videos were just sampled, and the attention span and the “related” box on the right did their job of making them switch to some other video before the current one ended. Out of the 75% of videos that were skipped at some point at least half of them reached 1 minute of viewing. This can mean a couple of things or can be just a coincidence. But let’s explore the possibilities.
Bullet lists are the future?
In about a minute to deliver interesting content or there’s a very big chance your viewer will skip the rest. Ok, sounds fair and possible. And also it happens to be true for (let’s round it down a little) over a half of your viewers or more. (70% give or take 10). That means that to deliver the message you need to be brief. Well for starters there needs to be a message right? Wrong!
There needs to be interesting action too. Unless the message itself is funny enough or odd / weird enough to grab the attention. So a mix of both would work. But it got me thinking. Let’s sum up the facts.
1 minute of time. We want to say a few things that the people will remember. But we know the attention span is lower and lower every second. So what do we do? Then it got to me! Bullet lists! Well not literally of course. But keep your information bullet-listed. For example say things like : We do web designs. And flash them with something. Then to grab their attention put on a funny monkey dancing or an elf, whatever. Then out of the sudden say : Liked the monkey? Pause. Yeah, we do viral videos too. That’s of course is just a stupid example but you should get the point. Make short, easy to understand sentences and divide them into areas.
What doesn’t really fit this rule?
Tutorials, instructional video, news on recent events, interesting documentaries. And most of all things the user wanted to watch and actively searched for them.
Entertainment content
Study shows that entertainment content made by amateurs (funny songs by non-professionals, short funny videos or sketches) needs to by 5 minutes or less or it’ll generally loose the viewers attention. That’s mostly because of the production value, and it’s pretty obvious. But that just proves that for a video to be successful it needs not only to be short, but also really well made.
Pyramid
So if we have a little less than a minute to deliver the content we need to structure it somehow. Either from least important to the most important. Or as I think it’d be best – the other way around, just starting with some entry content first. That might engage users enough to get your message before they skip the video. But remember that after 30 seconds they should be paying attention so don’t make those 30 seconds a boring time, or they might not wait for your great finale at 0:55. Keeping all of that in mind, let’s go make some virals!