What kind of video will online users actually watch? To find out, Cyndy Green tried a small experiment this summer at the Lodi News Sentinel. The results are interesting, if not terribly surprising.
Her working assumption was that viewers will watch “stupid and sports.” Turns out they do gravitate to offbeat stuff–the most-viewed video in July was a classic “egg frying on car.” What else worked?
Very local stories, event stories, unusual stories. Looking at the numbers, a paper the size of the Sentinel doesn’t need to flood the market with videos. Just carefully choose the ones you feel your audience will view. Lesson learned.
Maybe there’s one more lesson if you want to increase online video viewership: make your videos easy to find. I wanted to check out some of the videos Cyndy mentioned, but after searching all over the Lodi site for any video, I came up empty.
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