辣点子:嘿，你! 注意!——我们忽视视频的三个原因

I have been watching a movie for 3 days now. The one lonely Hulu Firefox tab is surrounded by Gmail, 潘多拉, UPS跟踪, Kayak, 还有读了一半的文章. 马蒂·费尔德曼1977年的经典之作 《百家乐软件》 is a Mel Brooks-style comedy featuring short scenes mixed with sight gags and sophomoric humor, held loosely together by a classic fish-out-of-water story. This style is a mirror of current consumer attitudes. Make me laugh, make it snappy, and get out of the way. But why can’t I find 84 minutes of uninterrupted time?

Distractions and short attention spans are the culprits for ignoring advertisements, 但更可怕的是. I find myself disregarding content just as often as ads. Now that I have your full attention (until your Twitter/ email/text/Facebook beeps at you), let’s look at three reasons why consumers are ignoring video.

我有权力!
He-Man jokes aside, consumers do have the power. As video has migrated from the TV and the theater to computers, "viewers" have become "users.什么都是被动的, two-button experience (on-off and change the channel) is now a fully engaged, infinite-button经验. If I want to have multiple windows open, 和几个朋友聊天, 做一些工作, and watch your video at the same time, then I have the power (even if I don’t reside in Castle Grayskull). Most traditional broadcast content was not designed to be consumed online. That’s why we are seeing the rise of webisodes, 播客, and more-interactive content.

Consumers want to experience their stories in a radically different way. The success of your content rests solely on whether or not your audience wants to engage with it. That should scare you or excite the pants off of you.

按内容分类
I have watched video via RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Seesmic, blip.tv, iTunes, email, Hulu, Viddler, Vimeo, and Flickr ... 今天. It’s no wonder consumers are not paying attention. I definitely fall on the early adopter side. But according to Nielsen, 130 million U.S. 网络用户观看了9.在2009年3月有60亿的流量. And emails, blog comments, user reviews, links, sharing, embedding, etc.，都是网络视频的副产品. The "users" are creating an infinite amount of distractions to go with their stories. 在某些情况下, they are creating their own video shows, 播客, 视频博客, 以及所有的辅助内容. (搜索 Google for "He-Man fan fiction"; it’s amazing.)

As more "viewers" become "users," their already-full lives expand even more. 更多的 conversations with a global audience on a wider base of networks means less average interaction time. All of this 信息 can lead to overload, 倦怠, and an even shorter attention span for new content or ads. The current reaction in advertising is to interrupt more often and with bigger, bolder content. Times Square in New York City is a great example of what ad one-upmanship can create. Only time will tell how consumers deal with being crushed by content. 但这就是我们想要的，对吧?

被科学蒙蔽
The most interesting reason that consumers are not paying attention is a physiological one. It’s probably a self-defense mechanism to keep us from buying too many "free" credit reports or overdosing on boring news anchors. But eye-tracking research shows that we are ignoring banner ads and that we quickly lose interest in broadcast-style videos. useit的雅各布·尼尔森.com has published many findings on what people focus on when they watch online video. Nielsen found that "users are easily distracted when watching video on websites, especially when the video shows a talking head and is optimized for broadcast rather than online viewing.在一个24秒的视频剪辑中, people looked at content off the screen as much or more than the video. In the heat-map image of where people looked during the video, there is a red hot spot over the "close window" button. Maybe our brains are trying to tell us to relax.

我们现在该怎么办?
One caveat is that if someone wants content bad enough, 他或她将忍受广告, 找一个洪流, or do whatever is necessary to watch a favorite show. 去问狂犬 失去了 fan to miss an episode and see how well that goes over. So how do we get consumers to pay attention? 很简单:给他们想要的. We have more choices now than ever before. So find your target audience, ask them what they want, and then listen to what they say.

Now back to Marty Feldman … ring, ring, beep, beep … sigh … maybe tomorrow.