The Long And Short Of It
When it comes to the digital marketing world, the only permanent thing is change, which means I’m constantly experimenting and A/B testing what resonates most with our audience. Do articles or videos generate more click-throughs from our email newsletters? Do revolvers or polymer pistols drive more traffic to our website from social media? Which videos yield the most engagement and what do they have in common?
Much of my focus lately has been on the video side, and finding the right balance of short-form and long-form videos. It’s been an interesting and eye-opening experiment, to say the least.
Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how digital media affects our lives said, “In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2.5 minutes. Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.”
Based on our YouTube analytics, I believe it!
Shorts Work
For the past six weeks, we’ve posted one or two YouTube shorts a day, Monday through Friday — the majority of which are clips taken from our full-length GUNS Magazine Podcast episode. The Shorts have amassed approximately 90,800 views, the majority of which were not from current subscribers.
A five-second up-close clip of Roy Huntington shooting a Mag-na-Ported Ruger LCP MAX .380 garnered 7,622 views, whereas our longer views are averaging 700¬–1,900 views in the first 28 days after being posted.
Consistently posting shorts has also helped increase our average monthly video views to 251,000 from 189,000–235,000 and helped increase our GUNS Magazine Podcast playlist views by 28%.
Although the Shorts make us literal pennies in ad revenue compared to our long-form videos, there’s no denying the impact they’ve had on the overall growth of our channel and the increased reach to viewers that have likely never been exposed to our brands before.
That being said, it’s a great time to get in touch with your ad rep to inquire about our video offerings!
