Why we all love watching videos online (especially at work)

18th December 2008, 04:27 pm by Matt Rhodes

Whether it’s a sneezing panda, Charlie biting that finger, or just Rick Astley, everybody loves a good online video. It doesn’t have to be amusing either, some of the most popular videos online are factual and we see great use of video in online communities to engage people in a way that articles and text often can’t. Whatever the balance is of serious to amusing (and I would guess it was weighted towards the latter) a report out today from Nielsen Online tells us what most employers have always suspected. That most of us are watching videos at work.

Their VideoCensus of US internet users showed that 65% of all people who watch online video do so during 9am and 5pm on weekdays – when they’re at work. By contrast on only 51% of them are viewing videos during the day at weekends. There are probably some reasons that help to explain this – broadband penetration, whilst high across the US, is higher for corporates than for individuals and so viewing videos may be easier for some at work than at home. However, I suspect the real reasons are that videos make up many of the popular virals that are sent to work email addresses, and that videos are distracting and engage people in a way that is different to other material they see during working hours.

Whatever the reasoning behind this survey, it is true that video engages. It’s a really powerful tool and one that is worth perfecting if you’re in the business of using social media or running online communities. At FreshNetworks we make a lot of use of video in the communities that we run and anybody who joins the team very quickly gets used to picking up a camera, interviewing some people and editing it down to a short clip for one of the communities. Recently I was sent a copy of a new book from O’Reilly Media (YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts) and whilst I was initially skeptical about this, it’s much more use than the title suggests – and we now use it as a textbook of how to make good video for online.

In our communities, we find that community members respond better in some circumstances to video than they do to articles, and that the completed view rate is often higher than I suspect the completed read rate is for longer articles. Finally, we find that providing video is a great way to stimulate activity on the communities themselves. Not only do people interact around the content, they are also much more likely to upload their own videos after we have uploaded some.

So whether we watch them too much at work or not, videos are really good engagement tools online and can help to boost activity on an online community.

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4 Comments

Simon Kendrick:

As this indicates, video usage is now mainstream. Younger people may view more, but it is not an alien concept and it is an area with many benefits that should be explored.

After all, Youtube is now the no.2 search engine
18 December 2008, 5:27 pm
Matt Rhodes:

Simon,

For me, video joining the mainstream has been one of the real developments of 2008 in the social media space. I was speaking at a conference earlier this year with Pete Clifton from BBC new who spoke about the change they’d made from links to video content to embedding video in their news items. I cna’t remember the exact figures, but the increase in people watching (and in people watching to the end of the clip) was huge.

Thanks for the comment

Matt
18 December 2008, 6:54 pm
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