This is part of the behind-the-scenes section of Mixergy, which I call etc.

People who saw an overview of my video data, wanted to see more, so I thought it’d be helpful to look at data for a specific video. Here’s my graph for the Daniel Brusilovsky interview.

A few warnings

  1. Wistia and I have a business relationship. You’ll see their ads on my site soon. And I got my Wistia account for free.
  2. My analysis below of the Wistia data is just based on hunches right now. What I’d like to do next is check some of these hunches with A/B tests. If you have a suggestion for what I should use to A/B test my video embeds, let me know.
  3. Wistia is NOT running analytics on my viewership via RSS or iTunes or MP3 or iPhone or anything except straight-up hits on their player.

Observation #1: There’s a natural drop-off upfront

I always see a drop off in the first few minutes of my videos. I thought it was just caused by ads. What’s interesting about this interview is that I didn’t get a chance to record an ad and there’s still a noticeable drop-off.

Mixergy - Daniel Brusilovsky - no ads

typical ad

Observation #2: People are telling me what’s most important to them

I’ve noticed that I’m getting a good response for my clip posts. Here’s an example:

2,881 view for my full interview with Laura

Watch the full interview with Laura Fitton

1,947 views for just a CLIP from Laura’s interview

You can see how a little bit of editing grows my traffic with much less work. The problem is that I can’t always find that clip that people want to see. Data like this makes it easier to find what my audience wants.

Mixergy - Daniel Brusilovsky - clip

Observation #3: 20% of my viewers will watch all the way to the end

This 20% is pretty consistent, regardless of the length of the interview. My interview with Anand of AnandTech, for example was 70 minutes long. 20% watched it till the end. My interview with Tim Sykes was a whopping 80 minutes long, 20% watched it till the end.

I thought that because this interview was shorter and more newsworthy, I’d get a higher retention rate. Nope. 20%.

Mixergy - Daniel Brusilovsky - watching till the end

There are a couple of outliers. Paul Graham’s interview, for example, retained over 25% of the audience. I’m thinking of doing this kind of walk-through for his video too. Let me know what you think.

What do you think?

  • Was this post useful to you? Should I do more like this?
  • What other data should I look at?
  • I want to add a Wistia ad to Mixergy. How can I make it useful?

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