Newswise Blog

Monday, June 14, 2010

Video Entices Eyes to your News Releases

How does video influence the natural history of a news story?  Does it influence interest in the story?  Our data say emphatically, yes!
Video is not the story, but it is definitely the medium and contributes to the packaging; like the headline or the lead, it attracts eyes to the story.

Examining the natural history of news, video compares to the colorful plumes on bird or flowers’ attraction for insects.  These visual phenomena bring eyes and attention to the content; they motivate interaction.  Quite in contrast to camouflage, video, like decorative feathers, entices. It carries context messages, pulls in potential suitors, and increases seminal potential.
 
This is not based simply on opinion or anecdotal evidence.  Newswise gathered data from a two-year period and consistently found that video increases readership. 

For the first quarter of 2009 and 2010, we compared the hit counts on all articles with video to all articles without video.  The data demonstrate an average 24% increase in hit counts, or readership, of news releases containing video over both first quarters of 2009 and 2010. This is a powerful and consistent impact of what is considered a non-content, or context, issue.

Of course the ultimate goal in the natural history of a news story is to have major outcomes beyond just the access to the story, but clearly anything that positively influences attraction to the news release will positively influence ultimate outcome, which is why birds have those beautiful colored feathers and flowers package the pollen in decorative petals.

I suspect if we dug deeper we’d find that people with really great video were getting the lion’s share of the increased traffic, while those with talking heads and other less-than-scintillating images saw little or no increase. To me, it all comes back to content. I was talking to one of our researchers in our Information School who confirmed what should be obvious: it’s the content that matters. Bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles are a waste of bandwidth.

We have a correlation here, but not proof of cause and effect.  One alternative explanation could be that the originators of the stories were more likely to go to the effort of producing video if they thought the story was more important than average.

I agree, Bill, this is not proof of concept, just preliminary data supporting further investigation of the topic.  We’ll have to do a double-blind trial.

Roger