Video Abandonment and How To Stop It
The length of your online marketing video is a very important key for success; second only to creating great content. If this is surprising, you haven’t spent enough time on the web. On the internet, attention is the new currency. If you want to boost sales and watch your business grow, you need to figure out how to get people to pay attention to your company. The easiest and most convenient way for consumers to learn about your company is through video, but in order to best utilize this tool, you need to know about human online-viewing habits.
Where’d Everybody Go?
The internet has all but wiped out our patience as a species. With faster and faster internet speeds, there is no reason to wait or sit through anything when it comes to the web. There is a direct correlation between the length of a video and the abandonment rate; the longer the video the higher the drop-off rate. In a study done by the University of Massachusetts, researchers discovered that after clicking ‘play,’ roughly 6% of the audience departs every second. After only five to ten seconds a mere 80% of viewers remained. This means you’ve got less than five seconds to capture a person’s attention if you want them to hear your full message.
But wait – there’s more:
Most viewers decide quickly whether or not they want to watch, and once they’ve made their decision, usually stick around until the end. However, this varies dramatically with the length of the video. Halfway through a 30 second video, 80-90% of your viewers are still sticking around – whereas 50% of the way through a ten minute video, you’ve only retained about 30% of your audience. 
So with statistics as alarming as these, you want to do everything you can to ensure your company produces an interesting video that people will want to watch. Ideally, you would be able to pack your entire message into a brilliant, captivating, twenty second video – but let’s get real; what else we got?
Your Options
The type of video carrying your message has a large impact on viewer abandonment rates. The graphs and statistics above are generalized and include all types of video formats. Let’s look at the main types of videos in those averages and see what we’re dealing with:
Pre-roll ads – If you’re thinking about launching your video as a pre-roll ad feeding off the views of a more popular video, just know that pre-roll ads have abandonment rates as high as 70%, and that’s for a video only thirty seconds long. If you want to let people know about your company and want to better your chances of people listening to your entire message, this is not the route for you.
Live action ads – The statistics for live action ads, for the most part, parallel the graphs above. They average 6-7% drop per second viewed. This isn’t terrible, it’s the same as most videos, and if you create unique content you have a shot at your video being above average – but there is something better.
Whiteboard animation ads – Whiteboard animation is the most interactive form of online advertising. It has been proven to catch consumers’ attention quicker and keep them watching for longer. Feast your eyes on some of the statistics we’ve found specifically for whiteboard animation videos. We even put in the screen shot of our live video stats so you can see a comparison.
Live Video Drop Off Rate Is 50%
While the video engagement rate drops to 80% after 30 seconds on the average marketing video, whiteboard animation videos don’t reach that level until after the one minute mark. Viewer retention is still above 75% even after two and a half minutes.
To get a better idea of the averages we took our four most viewed videos and put the collected data into this graph:
As always, viewer retention varies with the length of the video, but on average whiteboard animation hooks viewers faster and keeps them for longer. The graph below shows the average of the combined four videos:
Whiteboard videos have a drop of 25% over two minutes of video; unlike the other types of marketing videos that see a 35-55% drop in viewers. As a matter of fact, while the average video struggles to retain viewers as length increases, we’ve found that the longer the whiteboard animation video, the better our retention rates were. Meaning a lot more people were willing to watch for a lot longer.
If you’ve got a message you just can’t squeeze into thirty seconds and feel every word is important for your target audience to hear, you need a whiteboard video. It’s your best chance to get your product or service out there without people disregarding it because of boredom or impatience. Whiteboard videos are incredibly engaging – watching an illustration materialize before your eyes is hypnotizing. It is easy to get caught up in the artwork and feel as if you are right there with the artist.
Not only are the viewer statistics above average, whiteboard animation is also very affordable. If you want your video to have the best chance of being seen without breaking your budget, you need to get in touch with us. In this world of ever-competitive internet global marketing, why wouldn’t you take advantage of all the ways available to give your company the edge?
Video Abandonment-How to Stop It!