I'll attach fifty screenshots to this post. These are the absolute audience retention rates (as of the time of this writing) for the last 50 public videos on my channel that have them. You can see the videos they correspond to by going to the channel of youtube.com/acerthorn, clicking on the "videos" tab, and - with the videos sorted by newest to oldest - view the videos starting with "When Gamer Entitlement Really Does Become a Problem" (the most recent video for which audience retention analytics are available) and ending with "Let's Play Fallout: New Vegas Blind #01 - Ack the Amnesiac," while skipping over the announcement videos such as "Let's Plays are Going Part Time," "Harry Potter Retrospective - the Introduction" and "Acerthorn's Patreon Page." I didn't look at their analytics because they weren't designed to get views, per se, but just to keep my audience abreast of what's going on.
Now, some of these audience retention analytics are more jagged than others. Some go up and down like a roller coaster. Others, after the first few minutes, tend to be relatively slow but steady declines. However, there is one common element among all of them: The very start of the videos usually see a dramatic drop in viewer retention.
Some of my videos are more than an hour long, so maybe some people are intimidated away by the video's length. But then, why are the other videos that aren't that long having the same problem? A commonly-cited reason for videos that have this problem is that the intros are too long. Some of my videos have intro sequences ... no more than ten seconds long ... but there are just as many other videos in this list of 50 that don't have any intro sequence. I instead just get right to the point. And yet, I still get the same huge drop in retention at the outset.
Can somebody please take a look at my videos and find a common element that might actually be causing this problem? Something that each of these videos actually have in common (not just something that's a problem with some videos but not all) which would explain why they all have the same audience retention problem.
Now, some of these audience retention analytics are more jagged than others. Some go up and down like a roller coaster. Others, after the first few minutes, tend to be relatively slow but steady declines. However, there is one common element among all of them: The very start of the videos usually see a dramatic drop in viewer retention.
Some of my videos are more than an hour long, so maybe some people are intimidated away by the video's length. But then, why are the other videos that aren't that long having the same problem? A commonly-cited reason for videos that have this problem is that the intros are too long. Some of my videos have intro sequences ... no more than ten seconds long ... but there are just as many other videos in this list of 50 that don't have any intro sequence. I instead just get right to the point. And yet, I still get the same huge drop in retention at the outset.
Can somebody please take a look at my videos and find a common element that might actually be causing this problem? Something that each of these videos actually have in common (not just something that's a problem with some videos but not all) which would explain why they all have the same audience retention problem.
