Humans have short attention spans. And thanks to the great distraction known as the Internet, it’s getting harder than ever to focus on one thing at a time. Attention span has a pretty direct impact on content and video marketing. SumoMe looked at 650,000 sessions and found that only 20% of people actually read articles start to finish. (Yeesh—we’ll be keeping this post short to avoid losing 80% of you.) We assumed there’s a similar drop-off in video engagement, so we dove into our customer data to find out how long videos should be, when you should go long, and if there are any situations where seconds matter. We confirmed our theory that humans have really short attention spans, but we found some other useful takeaways too. ### Video length vs. engagement Because every video is a different length, we decided to explore length vs. engagement. Do people take length into consideration when they decide to watch or leave? We wanted to find out. We expected engagement to decrease with video length. In other words, we would expect people to watch more of a 1-minute video than a 2-minute video. But we also imagined that increasing a video from 1 minute to 2 minutes—a difference of 1 minute, but 100% longer—would have a much bigger impact on engagement than the jump from 10 minutes to 11 minutes—a change of one minute, but just 10%. In mathspeak, we expected that the relationship wasn’t linear. We predicted we’d see an exponential decay like the one below: 
It’s safe to assume that your viewers have short attention spans and plenty of distractions. The ideal length depends on the content, the context, and the viewer. So study your engagement graphs and keep it interesting!
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In most venture-backed companies, investors will help you build a car more quickly, but in return, your gas pedal needs to be drilled into the floor. Management tells you, “This will always go as fast as possible. Figure it out.” This mentality creates a ton of stress, and it often breeds tunnel vision. And this is why we will sometimes see speed demons veer off the road and crash.
There’s nothing like advice from a sage guardian. “Make sure you prepare for success,” he said. He believed in us and warned us that if this really did work out, we needed to be prepared for the consequences. We hadn’t been thinking about what would happen if we actually hit our goal. We were haphazardly barreling into the first turn of a long road trip.
“Where am I going?” Brendan contemplates the next decade of his life. We started out with questions like ownership—would we want to work together through the next ten years if we split the company 70/30? 60/40? 50/50? Did it really matter who had the initial idea? Did it matter who put in slightly more hours or slightly more money? We knew that while we both brought different values to the table in the short term and that an uneven split would certainly make one of us miserable over the long term. This decision-making process became a habit. We started running every significant question we had about Wistia’s business through a kind of “ten year test”: - What if our sales experiment works, and we become a sales-driven organization over the next ten years? - What if we take money from this investor, and we have to build a company with her for the next ten years? - What if we really build out this video production marketplace and then have to sustain it over the next ten years? We knew that Wistia would take a long time to grow, and some decisions you make early on can’t be reversed. This form of decision-making was our way of making sure we were always moving in the right direction and not doing something unsustainable. ### When the walls start shaking The last year and a half was the fastest period of growth in Wistia’s history. We had the pedal to the metal. As the team grew from 30 to more than 60 people, though, we started drifting over lines and riding the rumble strip.
We slowed down hiring, decreased spending in certain areas, helped people grow into roles, reshuffled some teams, and made transparency a team priority. Interestingly, from what we’ve observed since then, it’s not necessarily the speed that causes stress at startups. Stress can be caused by: - Not knowing why you’re doing the work - Not believing that it’s possible to achieve your goals It’s not about how fast you’re driving the car—it’s about building a car that can turn around obstacles, stop on a dime, and accelerate when you have an open road. Startups need growth to survive, but to do it without burning out, you have to focus on the integrity of your car. With forethought and frequent communication with your team, you can build a dependable Ford. ### Culture is the governor of growth Culture has to be your governor of growth because it’s difficult to make hard and fast rules. Sometimes the market is moving super quickly, and you have to hustle, or you’ll miss a huge opportunity. Sometimes you push too hard, realize the consequences, and have to be willing to slow down. You can’t just rely on numbers to dictate when to do what. You have to check in with the people that you hope to play this crazy game with in ten years time. 
If you push your team out of an obsession with the numbers, it makes every other value you hold suddenly appear irrelevant. If you can’t preserve your values, you’ll fail. You always have to make the decisions that will set you up for growth in the future, even if that means pumping the brakes now.
According to data we pulled from across all Wistia-hosted videos using calls to action, the click-through rate for calls to action that include the word “click” is the highest, at just over 15%, and “click here” comes in second, at around 11%. The average click-through rate for CTAs not using any form of “click” was just under 10%.
The difference is even more pronounced when using annotation links. Annotation links that included “click here” were about 4 times as effective as annotation links that didn’t include the word “click.” Using “click” was about 3 times as effective as not using the word at all. As with any data finding, it’s important to consider your context and your audience before making changes. In other words, don’t revise all of your CTAs and annotation links solely because of this data. At Wistia, we’re proponents of 
Either option brings new users into their account, so they can start exploring all that Wistia has to offer. Though, if we’re being honest, we’d much rather have them upload their own videos to get up and running right away. But, we realized that some people might not have a video file handy. We wanted them to be able to see Wistia’s features in action, so we created a loaner video that they could use. Exploring Wistia’s features with our loaner video is like viewing an open house with staged furniture. New users can begin to visualize what the place could look like with their own stuff. They can match the video player color to their company’s branding, add 
The actual video they used to borrow was a cute video of Lenny (our office dog and unofficial mascot) running around with a VCR tape in his mouth. Everyone loves cute. Everyone loves Lenny. So that’s the video we chose. We’ve embedded it below so you can watch for yourself.
### 1. Establish the lines of communication Pre-production often gets overlooked, but it’s the first interaction between you and your client and one of the most crucial time periods in your relationship. A little care in this early stage of the process can lead to big payoffs down the road. Similarly, missteps here can lead to missed opportunities. During the discovery phase, you should not only learn about your client, but you should brief the client on who you are and how your team works. Clearly establishing who will be doing what clues the client into your process and brings them in as a collaborator, rather than an outsider. First, 
Establish a clear goal and key metrics for measuring your video’s success. Who is the video intended for? What marketing goal will it help hit? Where will it live, and how will it be promoted? Don’t forget to review the budget and timeline to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. Next, establish a single point of contact between the client and you. Typically, this is a project manager, production coordinator, or some other manager who has a good high-level understanding of what’s going on. While it can seem restrictive to limit communication in this way, having one person on each side ensures that what is communicated is clear, concise, and consistent. Down the road, it can also streamline post-production. Your client point of contact should be responsible for organizing approvals, so that you’re not wrangling feedback from all sides. ### 2. Check in regularly before production begins At this stage in the process, it’s important to have regular check-ins so everyone knows what’s going on. Internally, this should happen in weekly or even daily status meetings. With clients, the frequency can be less long, as you’re meeting any deadlines set up in advance. Do set up quick calls or emails whenever you hit specific milestones, like completing a creative brief, drawing up storyboards, or setting a schedule. Use tools like Google Docs for script revisions and shared Trello boards for glanceable status updates. They reduce the urge to schedule excessive meetings.
When it comes time to do the shoot, a call sheet is an extremely handy tool to make sure that everyone’s on the same page. A big budget shoot will often have a dense sheet with a ton of detail, but a call sheet doesn’t have to be complicated to be useful.
Take the time to gather qualitative data, like feedback from viewers in comments, shares, tweets, and posts. Take screenshots of these throughout the campaign and include them in reports and follow-up meetings. These may not have the elegance of numerical data, but are great ways to probe how your audience engaged with your content. As far as reporting frequency, it often depends on the speed of the platform you’re delivering on. For social, daily internal updates are not overkill. Weekly client calls can be very helpful, in addition to larger monthly reports. For a larger evergreen web video, a monthly update might be all you need. Experiment and choose the frequency that lets you react quickly and nimbly, without being forced to act on noise and not signal.
The data suggests that most people are using videos to promote a specific product or feature rather than to build an email list. And for good reason: Wistia Calls to Action have an average conversion rate of 11.04%. 
Turnstiles (7.2%) and annotation links (3.4%) appear not to convert as well, but the data is somewhat misleading. Remember that Turnstiles have higher stakes, since they ask for an email address as opposed to a click, and annotation links don’t stop the video when they appear. In general, the lower the stakes, the easier it is to promote action, so comparing conversion rates between all three isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. Also, note that a 3.4% click rate for a non-obtrusive link is pretty high regardless of the platform and medium. ### How Fleetio uses all three Timeline Actions Can you use all three at once? Certainly! 