Now that we have a wealth of video tracking data at our fingertips, we thought we’d put the old “shorter is better” theory to the test.

The Initial Test

We worked with one of our customers who has been testing two variations of the same video. The red line in the graph above represents the engagement of their 30-second video. The blue line is the engagement graph for a 90-second video. It’s expected that these two videos would have different engagement graphs, but what’s odd is that the first 30 seconds of both videos are identical!

Even though viewers were exposed to the same exact content, the drop-off rate of the 90-second video was much higher. By the end of the 30-second video there were about double the number of viewers than at the same point in the 90-second video.

A Wider Look

Our initial test got us thinking. Does this hold true on a larger scale? We decided to look at completion percentages across the thousands of videos we host.

We were right! Shorter videos are more engaging than longer videos, but there are some other unexpected trends. The average 30-second video was viewed 85% of the way through, while the average 2-minute video was viewed on average 50% of the way through. That is a very fast viewership drop-off. But what’s surprising is that the average viewing percentage stays quite consistent for 2-minute videos to 10-minute videos. That means the time spent watching is increasing almost proportionally with the video length during this period. Take a look:

What does this mean?

The data is quite clear, shorter videos are more engaging than longer videos. For videos 2 minutes and under, you should strive to make your content as short and punchy as possible to guarantee the highest engagement. If your video is 30 seconds or under, it’s very likely that most people will watch it all the way through.

If your message is more complex, be comfortable taking the time to explain it, but understand that half of your audience won’t make it to the end of the video. With this in mind, you would be well served to front-load your video with the most important parts of your message.

Understanding the relationship between video length and viewer engagement can help you ensure that your audience is getting the most out of your videos.

Just take a look at these 3 examples. It took me no time flat to whip up these beauties! Click here to see them in Wistia.

What can I do with this?

• Create web forms – Create a form right next to your video and let your prospects sign up for your mailing list, register for a webinar, or even buy your product.
• Co-brand your content - Doing reviews and approvals with a client? Feature your customer’s logo in the project and make them feel right at home.
• Link to other content - Link viewers back to your website or to other content within your Wistia account.

How do I use it?

1. Navigate to a project or a media in your account.
2. Click ‘Create Sidebar Element’ from the Actions menu.
3. Add a ‘Description’ element.
4. Then click the ‘Edit’ link at the bottom of your new description element.

You can toggle between advanced and simple editing modes and for those HTML nuts out there, you can even edit the source directly. The possibilities are endless.

We’re really looking forward to see how you guys use this.

Watch this 45-second video to see how it works:

There are some situations where you just want a bunch of people to watch your video without having to jump through any hoops (e.g. enter a password or register).

Now you can have Wistia generate a secure link and send it to whomever you like, however you like. Of course, all the clicks and video views are tracked. You can even disable a link to revoke access.

Thanks to all our customers who helped push us in this direction. You know who you are!

Watch this quick screencast for an overview of how it works. Go easy on me, it’s the first screencast I’ve ever recorded.

Search tip: Forward slash (‘/’) is the keyboard shortcut for search.

I’ve created a quick screencast to show off the screen recording capabilities.

Ironically, you can’t record a screen recording of a screen recording using Quicktime X so I’ve recorded this with ScreenFlow.

Here is the original Quicktime X recording:

The process is simple and straightforward. Open Quicktime X and select “New Screen Recording” from the file menu. Hit the red button and you’re recording. When you’re finished, click the stop button in the menu bar. The default save location is your Movies folder. Then you can view it, trim it, or upload it to the appropriate site whether that’s YouTube, Facebook or your Wistia account.

If you’re a Wistia power user, chances are you do a good bit of contact management. And if you’re doing contact management, you most certainly use (or should be using!) contact groups to organize your account. Our Zebra release included a slew of new features that made contact and group management a whole lot easier, but there were a few things we missed.

Our survey uncovered that the workflow to remove a single contact from a group is rather painful: you have to go to the group, page through all the contacts, find the one you’re looking for, and then remove them. That’s a bummer.

We just released an update that allows you to remove a contact from a group right from their contact page. Say I’m in your account and you want to remove me from the “sales team” group because I can’t close a deal to save my life. Just go to my contact page and click the red “x” next to the sales team group. That was easy.

A special thanks to Murat from Pacific Trading for pointing this out and helping us work through the solution!

But wait there’s more! Ready to give the ScreenFlow/Wistia combo a try? You can download a copy of ScreenFlow and sign up for a Wistia account right here.

If you’re creating screencasts using ScreenFlow (which we highly recommend), it’s important to make sure that you’re exporting your screencasts with the right settings. We suggest choosing “Web High (Best Quality)” and keeping the scale at 100%. Your viewers will see the details of your screen better and you won’t have to worry about the dreaded “blurry feature syndrome.”

Look out for a screencast from us next week describing in more detail how Wistia and ScreenFlow work together like peanut butter and jelly!