Episode length for maximum audience retention.

Mckinise

Finally getting ready to begin production of an web series. My major concern is maximizing audience retention. Therefore, shorter is probably better. We will be starting with a Holiday episode and then moving on to episodic content early next year.

The first episode of the action series will be about 9 minutes long. I am using the following time blocks.

Action: 8 minutes Sitcoms: 5 Minutes Kidcom: 3 minutes (Think Fred or Hannah Montana Shorts)

I am toying with the idea of shortening the action series to about 5 minutes and leaving each episode on a cliffhanger, with the exception of the end of a story arc.

Each episode will include a Previous episode teaser for the action series.

The sitcom and Kidcom will both be stand alone.

Mark_the_Harp

Interesting topic. Have you had a trawl around YouTube to look at the retention graphs? If you haven't they basically show you where people leave a video. I found them quite interesting as a musician, because when you're performing live, you get a real sense of when people are engaged and when they lose engagement, and the YouTube graphs of my music videos do correlate quite well to my live experience. I mean, you can't please everyone, so the question for me is always "How can I catch those people who are more antsy / less settled, and get them to stay?"

I know it's not quite what you're asking...but maybe it might trigger something useful? So for example, as a performer I get more engagement in a live audience when I show the context - why is this music written / played like this, how does it relate to what's gone before / what's following, and how does that relate to the bigger social / political / technological developments happening at the time?

I'm interested in the answers you get about the specifics of what you are asking, because maybe I can adapt that to my music too!

My experience: people love context, they love to know what the boundaries are, how something fits into the bigger scheme of things. If you're clear about that, you can be pretty creative with what you offer and you will retain people's attention. If I read you right, you are clear about the various things you're offering but you're not yet clear about how they link together.

When you say "shorter is probably better" - I'm wondering about that statement. It's not as if there's a specific slot to fill (like in TV scheduling). You can have individual episodes any length you want. So can you make them "long enough to tell the story" - which may be different for each episode? When I worked in broadcast news, we always joked that the news bulletins had to be a fixed length because it would make more sense to make them the length they needed to be - anything from "Now an hour's extended report on..." to "Nothing much has happened today, so the news is 23 seconds long". Can you adapt that idea somehow? There are no inherent limitations with the web, unlike there are with physical delivery media. So there's nothing to say any episode has to be the same length as any of the others.

Mark_the_Harp

EDIT: Specifically with your items, could you do some sort of test with a single story and a representative audience - maybe, using my YouTube retention idea? Take one representative story and create several different length versions and invite people of the appropriate age to watch them. Sit with them as they watch them, and judge the amount of engagement moment to moment. Then you will get a sense of how long a treatment has to be for a story. Once you know that basic length of attention span, you have a base from which to plan your other episodes.

That user-testing idea is similar to what you'd do when designing a webpage, where you get someone to have a look at the page, and ask them to do certain tasks while you watch where they are placing the cursor, which gives you a really good idea of what's working and what isn't.

Mckinise

Youtube does feature retention in its analytics. Through my studies, and the observation of others, I have found attention starts to wane after the first couple minutes. At five minutes about half of the viewers are still watching.

Now, this has not been studied exclusively for short films, but I have had a couple videos with lengths greater than 5 minutes. By the fifth minute I was holding onto about 15% of my viewers.

Granted, the videos were not created with youtube in mind, but their lack of success did open my eyes to a couple things.

1- You have to grab their attention within the first 15 seconds or its game over.

2- Even if you gain their attention, you still have to deliver fast paced content and entertaining content.

3- Anything over a certain time frame, for me, 8 minutes will often be skipped over for shorter content, unless the viewers are invested in your previous works.

That said, I am still hoping that the biggest problem was the pacing of my content. It is difficult to tell a compelling story in 3 minutes or less.

svart

@McKinise Very interesting thoughts. The statistics might say something but I'd wager that the interest of the viewer is wholly dependent on the subject matter and how interested the viewer is in that subject matter in conjunction with how well the subject matter is presented. It's easy to test on yourself. Find something that you like, TV or film and you can sit there watching for hours and it will feel like minutes have gone by. Now turn the channel to something you do NOT like and watch for the same period of time. It'll feel like forever. Hell, even if it's some subject matter that you like but it's presented poorly, you'll feel like it's forever. That's because the interest level of the subject and the presentation dictate how attentive you'll be, not if the laugh tracks are timed just right on the timeline. Combine this with cell phones and tablets and various things that can take attention away and it's no wonder people tune out when they are only partially interested.

I'd bet sitcoms are NOT a good group to study. The subject matter is generic and based on banality with humorous punctuation at precisely timed intervals to keep interest. There is no real target audience because the creators and/or producers/production company want the audience to be as large as possible so they can't realistically create any specific areas of interest or they might lose some of the audience that isn't interested in that specific topic. Unfortunately I think the sitcom is it's own worst enemy in that it breeds this type of mentality in it's audience and instills their listless nature. With so many other choices on TV and the lack of real subject matter, it's no wonder people become bored with it so quickly.

I guess the film version of this is evident in the film rating system. I remember when a nice hard R rated movie was going to be a good adult movie full of all kinds of things that might be interesting. Now, studios are forcing more and more productions to be PG-13 in order to gain a wider audience. Sometimes parents need to bring their kids along to the movies, sometimes the studio wants to get the kids watching too, and so forth. Either way, the adult themes get toned down for the kids, more and more dialog is being added for the ladies and the sexuality is being cut down for kids and families. It's made good stories into boring product placements with poor acting from up-and-coming sex symbols, but without the sex. Because of this, nobody goes to the movies anymore and the studios are trying anything to get folks into the theaters, including the relentless onslaught of remakes of past money makers into boring generic fodder. I can bet you that there are clueless studio execs sitting around wondering why a remake bombed at the box office when the original made history.

I suppose it's a catch-22, maybe even a paradox. You need interesting things to keep people's attention, but you want the widest audience so you have to dumb it down which just waters down the interesting things and you start to lose their attention, so you try to gain new audience by watering it down more, etc and so on. Eventually you "jump the shark" and folks give up.

In addition, I see the music industry has already done this. Music used to be about the artist and labels used to find interesting acts and nurture them and back them with time and money. Now it's all about the label and artists aren't even given a chance unless they can prove a following and the label can make money. Because of this you get generic "pop" music from artists that have no staying power or message anymore. Because they don't have any real substance, people become disinterested quickly as the next big thing comes up which forces the label into the cycle similar to the movie studios of trying to be more and more generic to gain more audience as the audience dwindles down because the generic artist has no real message or interest.

vicharris

I'd say 5 minutes for drama and action and 2-3 for comedy. One of the most successful web series, I can't remember the name right now was 90 seconds per episode and it was suspense. Think it was 56 episodes in all and it did very well. I believe MTV paid for it but it was all done by younger people.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

I'd say 5 minutes for drama and action and 2-3 for comedy. One of the most successful web series, I can't remember the name right now was 90 seconds per episode and it was suspense.

I think it is very bad. I mean this trend and mass preferences.

vicharris

Doesn't matter if you think it's a bad idea. It's how peoples minds are wired. Can't do anything about that when they have the whole internet right behind the screen on another browser.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

It's how peoples minds are wired. Can't do anything about that when they have the whole internet right behind the screen on another browser.

It do not agree that it is peoples minds wiring. It is peoples habits. Bad habits. As they mostly mean that they waste their time and watch meaningless shit.

vicharris

Very true. The internet has spawned a generation or two of people with very low attention spans. I meant it's how they've been reprogrammed or rewired so to speak.

Mckinise

I find myself having to shoot different ways for different markets. Currently, it is far more profitable to create very short videos for youtube to finance my larger projects. The upside is that most of the subscribers will watch my longer content once they have become immersed within my world.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

http://filmmakermagazine.com/58685-spanned-attentions/

Mckinise

Excellent link and video. Thank you.

DouglasHorn

I have an action/sci-fi series called DIVERGENCE (much of it shot on hacked GH2s!) and my business partner and I are looking to launch more. You can check it out at: http://youtube.com/PopularUprising

I've put a lot of research into the topic. I came away with the following:

We started aiming for 8-10 minutes per episode but we're transitioning toward 5-7.
Episodes that are too short disappoint viewers--especially those who tune in each week for new releases.
People who watch in a block after release are less bothered by short episodes since they can just move to the next episode immediately.
Most people will view your series after the initial release.
We did not use a "Previously on..." (called a "catch-up" in TV) before our episodes because of the importance of the first 15 seconds.
We also kept our titles very short to get right into story.
We do use an "On the next..." leader after the credits, since people can easily skip this. (In fact we provide an in-video link to the next episode.)

svart

I don't agree that it's the internet's fault. I think it's mass media's fault. They are all trying/vying for your attention to sell their product and their sensationalist ways have infiltrated all other media forms as we become numb to each iteration. Combine that with the uninspired stories and boring filler combined with a little action or a little humor and it's no wonder people have such short attention. Again, if the story is interesting and the delivery is right, then you will have their full attention for as long as you like.

Mark_the_Harp

Absolutely, @svart. Someone posted a before/after grading example on this site the other day, and I was hooked on the story. The grading didn't matter to me either way in that sense. Well, it does matter, but it wouldn't have rescued a bad story.

I think you're spot on that it comes down to attention. We have more things vying for our attention nowadays - a lot of people, for example, accessing two devices (TV, ipod) at once, and time-sharing their attention to both.

And yes, the answer to this is good, interesting content, starting with a "way in" which invites you to feel involved and invest your time in something. It may even make people stop and watch for an hour! You can create all the social media buzz you like (and people may not find you if you don't) but after that it's absolutely down to having something compelling to say. It's what I was getting at in my earlier post above, that as well as creating the content to fit some arbitrary length of slot, you can also choose to make things of the appropriate length to suit the content - as we are less and less bound by specifics of a particular physical delivery medium and there's no rule that says something has to be 5 minutes, or 1, or 90.

When I do a harp video, for example, I'll try and do a very simple title which is a way into the calming world I try to create - a chance to step in and slow down. It's a difficult one but people can always skip that if they really want. Other than that, the content is exactly the length it needs to be. Even a static shot can be fine if what you're doing is good enough.

It's all a balance, it's about what's appropriate. Real no-no's for me are flashy template titles which look like some expensive production (with words like "studio" and "production" etc) - which then turn into someone's bedroom wobbly-cam with crappy sound. It's an instant switch-off because it makes me feel cheated. But then you can move on and see something else, and on the plus side, people are always looking for something to entertain them, so if you provide that, you've got it made.

jrd

I think we can blame the internet. Hyperlinks, multiple windows, simultaneously monitoring your email inbox, etc. isn't likely to focus the mind, and those are learned habits which persist offline.

When you buy a movie ticket, you're prepared to modify your behavior, to suit the demands of the format, and have no expectation of being able to perform other tasks (except for the patrons who insist on playing with the iphones every minute of it). You may even be willing to tolerate a measure of boredom, in a theater. But when you're viewing at home, particularly on a small screen, with dozens of other options immediately at hand, intention spans are necessarily going to be short.

This is hardly an original insight, but it's no less true for that. It would be interesting to know if people actually get through big literary classics on ipads and kindles; and those devices offer far less competition for attention than the web. It still seems unlikely anyone actually reads War and Peace, every word of it, on a kindle: the medium is at odds with the message.

Riker

I'll make my first post here :D hey guys, GH2 owner from Croatia :D

Anyway, this topic is one of the most interesting things for me...I find it amazing going through YouTube (aka the biggest "TV" network ever and forever) and seeing what content gets most views. I won't name any names, but for pete's sakes just look at the top tier YT channels, the content they provide and the views they get.

Are they to blame...or are the audiences to blame? Well...both. But there's no going around it, under it or over it.

I think there's more important shit in life than YouTube views. So shoot what you want to shoot and make the RT as long as you think it needs to be.

After all, imagine yourself entrapped in the YouTube celebrity persona...it's like that scene in Space Jam (LOL) where they threat to lock Mike up to sign autographs for the rest of his life...that's what being YT "star" is...destined to pull that same repeating shtick for the rest of your career, all for "like comment sub" and the $. One particular YouTuber (basically the internet version of Bob Saget) looks almost demoralized from time to time...I know his bank account is stacked, but I think he'll go off rails like Saget did, with that over the top "hey I'm not that nice guy anymore, I curse a lot!" burnout :D

Long story short - do what you wanna do :D

P.S. - the attention span chart is really disgraceful to look at. 0-30 secs, most likely clicked because of boobs in the thumbnail. All hail technology for taking bold leaps in showing what our true colors really are, collectively/generally speaking.

buildbyflying

I think it might have been Tom Sherman or Cory Doctorow (about Sherman's article on the video vernacular) who said, making videos for Youtube is like being a whore in a village of nymphomaniacs. If you want that audience; you may have to make some serious compromises.

Riker

Fast cuts, lolspeak, epic PH4IL bro, speak in memes, short bus humor, tits/ass on the magenta/cyan thumbs, all caps misleading titles.

Repeat. :D

JohnTollwannabe

Don't write and shoot for the Lowest Common Denominator. Those mouth breathers think movies like Michael Bay's Transformer franchise are some sort of Shakespearean masterpieces. If everyone went scrambling for that type of audience, I would weep for the future of film.

It's like the McDonald's analogy. Billions may have been served, but that doesn't mean the food's any good! And all you end up with is a worldwide explosion of Type 2 Diabetes sufferers. :)

Start raising the bar, don't stoop down to it.

Mckinise

I agree. I just wrapped up a couple episodes of a web series. They were okay for the most part, but I really had to condense what I wanted to say. 3 to 4 minute videos are good for comedy but not much else.

The experience was cool, but I am moving on to larger projects.

Of course, I will have to look at other ways to distribute. The YT video market is not very feature friendly.

soundgh2

Nobody can be arsed at working their minds on anything these days - continual catering for meniscus content viewing just trains us all not to dig any deeper - if we keep on churning out what the masses want then there's no excuse for the lifeless soul-lesss shit we'll be left with - if you be brave and test them a bit perhaps the yout of tomorrow may have a chance.

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