Video Will Eat Itself

With other stats pointing to the fact that you have 10 seconds to grab the attention of viewers in a clip and that 20% of viewers will click away from the video in 10 seconds or fewer. And it doesn’t get a lot better than that. You’ll lose about 1/3 of your viewers by 30 seconds, 45% of them by 1 minute and almost 60% by 2 minutes. And those numbers remain the same no matter how long the video is.

So, in line with this information, this got me reflecting on how the format of video has evolved over the last 6 months.

It started with Vine, launched in January – this gives everyone the chance to upload videos that are 6 seconds in length.

I then heard Trevor Beattie, a pioneer of advertising in the 90’s (fcuk/Wonderbra) talking at a Guardian hosted event in March, where he thought that the days of the 30-second advert are over, as people are able to absorb information far more quickly and felt that the short format offered by Vine offered a challenge to marketeers

The take up of Vine hasn’t been monumental, but its usage has definitely had an upturn over the last few weeks.

Then last month Instagram launched its video format, allowing users to upload movies of 15 seconds.

With the previous success of Instagram, being an incredibly popular photo site, now with the backing of Facebook, is this the optimum length of video we’ll get used to before getting bored?

This is a trend that cannot be ignored, as those of us that have been around the block a few times has seen everything shrunk to the minimal amount. Will it be 15 seconds, will it be 6? Could it even get shorter?

Will we have the next generation looking at us askance, questioning ‘You used to watch videos that lasted how long?????’, as we mutter on about vinyl records, dial telephones and the joys of broadsheet newspapers?

And if you got this far, you have a longer attention span than I thought.