Comments, Not Views, Are the Best Proxy For Viewer Engagement

October 21st, 2008

Recently, we developed TubeMogul InPlay, which allows us to track data far beyond the traditional metric of online video “views,” including how much of a video is actually watched, what the most popular segments of a video are, when a viewer clicks away and much more. While we anticipate releasing more macro-level research as we expand InPlay’s reach, we thought we would share some preliminary results from our beta testing with popular video site Viddler.com.

For the week ending October 10th, we took the top 100 most-viewed and top 100 most-commented videos from Viddler’s leaderboard and measured audience dropoff for each video (that is, second-by-second, the number of viewers that clicked away or kept watching as the video played).

Although both categories of video see audience dropoff over time, the most-commented videos are better at holding viewers, retaining an average of 9.25% more of their audience as time elapses. Interestingly, for top-viewed videos, overall audience size usually peaks at 20% into each video, meaning that many viewers are fast-forwarding part-way before the stream even starts.

Several factors limit the potential for extrapolation to the online video world at large: the small sample size, the fact that only streams from Viddler were tested, and that the data is not historical, but rather a one-time snapshot.

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