One thing you learn after conducting audience research in media for 50+ years:
You can’t believe everything respondents tell you.
This is less about them trying to be deceiving. It is more about how they often cannot explain the things they do. We see this as a research weakness, especially when you’re asking them to guesstimate time and their behavior.
This flaw plays out in a lot of familiar scenarios—how long they’ll sit through a commercial, a song, a host bloviating. And the more we encourage them to be precise, the less accurate they are. Again, it’s through no fault of their own. It is simply because of the difficulty of being precise.
And yet, we try to make these “educated guesses” so that we can glean the truth about how they’ll react in key situations—the length of a spot break, how long it takes them to get to the point when they end a bit, the length of an ideal video.
So, maybe we need to supplement today’s blog post with more than a grain of salt. The devil is always in the details. And the good news is there’s new research to help inform us. Our job as programmers/content creators is to cobble together the data, process it, and emerging with cogent strategies.
Perhaps a foundational finding is the growing popularity of short videos. I used italics because we don’t exactly know how respondents define video length. Nonetheless, we’ve been watching this trend in our Techsurveys.
The appetite for these in our commercial radio Techsurvey is trending up, especially among core radio listeners. But the question always comes down to how short is short?
In yesterday’s free webinar, Strategic Solutions‘ Hal Rood and Point-to-Point‘s Tim Bronsil provided some timely length data. While it relates to podcast tolerance, the study tells us the vast majority of podcast listeners also tune in radio. As we’ve long expected going back to our earliest interactions with the Podcast Movement conference, the “Broadcasters Meet Podcasters” supposition is correct. There’s a lot of overlap on their Venn diagram.
As the early analysts of PPM believed, those “opening lines” of a break, a feature, or a contest are of utmost importance. In “The Podcast Study,” nearly one-fifth of podcasting “Superfans” (the equivalent of P1s) may hang in there for a minute or less. As Hal and Tim concluded, the need to “win the first 60 seconds” is obvious.
After the webinar, I began to wonder whether this applies to video podcasts. Is the “patience window” more tolerant or even tighter when a podcast fan pulls up a favorite show on YouTube?
And then I recalled seeing recent data from EMARKETER that helps firm up the time recommendations. And you might find their data somewhat surprising. Of course, it’s not apples to apples, or even pears. The chart below shows “organic engagement rate” with videos by their length. They define “organic engagement rate” as responses—likes, comments, shares.
Rather than consumers trying to recall their behavior and desired length, a company called Pixability tracked these actions. And it turns out videos 1-to-3 minutes in length have the greatest propensity for interactivity.
The chart seems pretty obvious that it actually requires at least a minute of a viewer’s time for them to decide whether the content is worthy of their engagement. And it’s probably not lost on you that 2% engagement rate doesn’t seem especially high until you consider the onslaught of content—the good stuff, along with AI slop, spam, and other deceptive content consumers put up with every time they turn on their laptops or check their phones.
Still—and I think this is the key point behind all this data—you’ve got to keep them watching (or listening) to your content for at least a minute if interaction is your goal. And that likely means hooking them at the beginning.
My conclusion is that writers, producers, and talent need to treat their initial setup with the same care and attention that journalists typically spend on “the lead”—that opening line designed to suck you into a story, segment, or bit. And the data suggest time spent sweating the way podcasts, morning show bits, and basic breaks are constructed is proportionate to time spent listening, viewing, and engaging.
It is hard enough successfully getting a listener (or viewer) to land on our frequency, stream, or podcast. The quicker we get them to the good stuff, the better.
Length matters. But so does quality content. Marrying them is the key.
President & Founder at Jacobs Media
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched – a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created – a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the “connected car” and its impact.
Along with providing the creative and intellectual direction for the company, Fred consults many of Jacobs Media’s commercial and public radio clients, in addition to media brands looking to thrive in the rapidly changing tech environment.
Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
