Study reveals impact of poor online video performance on viewer behavior

By analyzing 6.7 million unique viewers from around the globe who watched a total of 23 million videos for 216 minutes over 10 days, researcher Professor Ramesh K. Sitaraman uncovered interesting insights about viewers' behavioral responses to slow-starting videos, re-buffering or failed visits.

While it's widely recognized that slow-loading websites cause Internet users to abandon, Sitaraman found the same of online video. Viewers were found to begin to abandon a video if start-up does not occur within the first 2 seconds, with each additional second of delay resulting in a 5.8% increase in abandonment rate. Furthermore, viewers typically abandon at a larger rate for short-form video than longer videos.

"Our work breaks new ground in understanding viewer abandonment and repeat viewership," concludes the report 'Video Stream Quality Impacts Viewer Behavior: Inferring Causality using Quasi-Experimental Designs'. "Further, it sheds more light on the known correlational impact of quality on viewer engagement by establishing its causal impact."

Other findings from the report include:

- Viewers experiencing a re-buffer delay that equals or exceeds 1% of the video duration played 5.02% less of the video compared with a viewer who experienced no re-buffering;

- A failed visit, where a video fails to play, decreased the likelihood of that viewer returning to the content provider's site within a week by 2.32%.

Tags: consumer behavior, online video, research, video best practices, video performance