• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, October 6, 2010

Okay, you've got ten seconds to get my attention, or I am outta here. Or so it seems when it comes to online video viewing. According to a new study from Visible Measures, 20% of of the audience for a video clip of under five minutes will abandon viewing in the first ten seconds. VM looked at behaviors across 40 million unique clips that added up to over 7 billion video views - a pretty convincing sample. Company CMO Matt Cutler writes in his blog post about the findings, "If your online video campaign has 10 million viewers, 2 million of them saw less than 10 seconds of it. Ouch."

They don't call it short attention span theater for nothing.

But the flight towards the next online experience gets even more intense in the next minute. The data shows that you will have lost a third of your audience in the first 30 seconds and then 44% by the end of the first minute. VM did not see a great variance in abandonment rates across clips of different lengths. Viewers are just as likely to leave at the same rates for a 30 second clip as they are to leave a two minute clip. That is interesting. Even when people can see the little progress bar coming to an early end they still won't put up with a video in which they just aren't interested.

In the longer brief on the research, available for download from it site, Visible Measures analyzes a popular clip from an Anheuser Busch Web-only ad for Bud Light. The "Beer and Porn" spot, which was Web-only for obvious reasons, was viewed by 950,000 on YouTube. But those viewers were only the ones that got past the first ten seconds. The ad had twice the usual 10-second abandonment rate. At least 40% bailed before the joke was apparent at the 12-second mark. At that point, the data reveals that this ad outperformed the normal rates of abandonment at subsequent milestones.

Hey a medium that lives by short attention spans will also suffer from them as well -- SQUIRREL!