The 2021 Vidyard Benchmark report is out and there are a few new video trends to note!
Whilst many of the corporate video trends in the Vidyard 2021 report are pandemic driven, (135% increase in videos created over 2019) there are some that surprise.
– More viewers are bouncing prior to the end of the video. The percentage of viewers watching a video all the way through is down from 52% to 45%.
– More user-generated/ internally generated videos are being created. A 44% increase in the Q2 of 2020 as organisations were moving to remote working due to the pandemic.
– Average video run time is up by over 50%, from 4 minutes to 6.06 minutes.
2020 saw more corporate videos produced with longer runtime’s, but with worse engagement, than in 2019.
We think these stats are related. The self generated video trend is leading to worse bounce rates.
Longer run times are the problem, editing a video to maximise engagement will always embrace the shortest run times possible.
User-Generated videos tends to be produced by low expertise individuals, often tainted by their close association with the business or product they are talking about.
Instead of focusing on what works in video, they focus on what they think is important to get into that video, box ticking.
There is a tendency by business’s to try to boil the ocean in a video, when much of the content internal producers want to include is inappropriate for the format, or irrelevant.
In almost all circumstances, less is more in video.
And this brings us to the final takeaway from the Vidyard report, engagement levels for runtime.
58% of viewers will watch all of a 60 second video, whilst only 43% of viewers will watch all of 150 second video..
With long form corporate video it gets worse, only 24% will watch a 20 minute video to the end.
The longer the video, the fewer people will see all of its messages.
As video runtime increases, the value of that video and the return on your investment, decreases.
User-generated content is perceived as being of lower cost, but is the value equation actually understood?
Lower engagement which results from user generated content needs to be factored into costs when considering whether to engage with expertise in video production.
But it’s worse than just poor value, self generated content may actually be harmful, not just poor value for money.
We know quality is a metric used for SERP results, and Google uses engagement levels and bounce rates as a measure of quality.
So high bounce rates and low engagement may negatively impact on businesses overall SERP’s.
Increasing quantity at the expense of quality may lead to worse SERP than producing less video of a higher quality.
The Vidyard video report shows smaller businesses produce far more user-generated content than larger.
Businesses with larger marketing budgets are producing more professional content, because they know this leads to better returns.
The challenge for smaller business’s is to overcome the price shock that engaging with expertise can bring.
This may be due to a lack of understanding of internal costs, balanced against the actual value of videos produced.
With the hidden costs of self generated video and the potential impact on SERP’s, businesses may be better off abandoning the “Any video is better than no video” mantra, towards getting best quality for the money.
Agile production overcomes a lot of the issues around value, quality, and volume, but thats for another post!
Contact us if you want to learn more about how our corporate video production can help benefit your business!
