Well guys, after a few solid months of monitoring numbers on several projects for member retention I have found that some extra hard work on your videos really pays off...
After some tests monitoring sites offering videos in various formats and various combinations of formats, a number of permutations were done and the combination that yielded the best customer retention was as follows:
Offer three sizes of videos: Full size "Broadband", Full Size "Modem User", and "Modem User" Segments. There is a fourth that helped real recently (see below) too.
- Broadband full size version of vid (very high bitrate like 1500) @ at 640 (or more for the Hi-Def vids).
Offer this in WMV for download and as a Flash embedded video (the buffering is SMOKING fast with a Flash vid... I can get a 1/2 gig file to buffer and play on my cable in 2 secs or less.
- Modem User full size version of vid (bitrate lower like 800) @ around 320.
Offering this in WMV only works fine.
- Modem Clips.
Same as Modem full size but use a program like WMV Splitter to cut them into 1.5 or 2mb segments.
And finally the kicker that really made a nice boost to results:
- IPOD Download.
Rip your Modem version to MP4 so people can play it on their Ipod.
I imagine having all these formats listed on the tours would help conversions too but I haven't gathered data on that yet. For any of you who have been in the paysite game long, you know how much money just 5% better retention can give you so this was a nice test to run.
Some notes:
WMV vs. MPEG wasn't all that different but WMV did edge it out. We didn't see any significant plus when offering both.
Embedding flash into pages as the sample video used to be rather in question because a low % of non-flashusing systems but having it with a link to D/L the WMV sample on tours is now showing the best results (see
www.tastygina.com).
We had some good returns using DIVX and XVID too but it was inconsistent. Seemed to do well on some sites and not others so I say to stick with the above where we saw no bad returns.
Hope ya'll find it usefull. If anyone else is willing to take part in similar type tests, please contact me. It'll get you some free work and help everyone in return.