Truth Tube

Next week Theo from YouTube is coming into our office to do a presentation. They have developed some new reporting tools that will help us further understand the behavioural patterns of YouTube users. The most significant of these will be able to tell us at what point viewers switch off our videos. Or to put it more bluntly, exactly at what point our videos get boring. The initial findings are interesting. Imagine that the horizontal flatline of an electrocardiogram represents viewer interest.


Then imagine that this flatline runs alongside your video from the start. The line stays nice and flat for the first 30 seconds. No electrical activity. Viewer interest is steady and high. You hit 52 seconds. Oh shit. The line plummets into a deep dark trough. What the fuck happened? Everyone switched off your boring video, that's what happened. According to YouTube statistics, 52 seconds into a video is the average point at which viewers are liable to turn off if their interest starts to wane. That's the 'Danger Time' (DT).

Back to our electrocardiogram. At 2 minutes 38 seconds the line triumphantly shoots back up; that is apparently the average point that viewers skip forward to. And if they like what they're seeing, they'll wind back to 1 minute 43 seconds on average and watch until the end.

So what have we learnt?

Basically make sure that something 'good' happens in your video at 52 seconds and at 2 minutes 38 seconds. Write it into your treatments. Tell your editor. Tell the fucking DOP. And no one cares about your visual poem in homage to Tarkovsky. They want boobies. And dancing robots. And fighting. And Ketamine trips. Viewer interest is key. We want a nice flatline throughout the video. No drop off. Every video has to be a 'Flatline Banger' (FB).

Statistically Geo Da Silva's 'Do It Like A Truck' is the least boring video ever made. It is a paradigm for how videos should be in this new era of 'Flatline Bangers'.



Atlantic is currently developing 'Flatline Banger' software to replace the now obsolete Harding Test. Moving foward all videos will have to pass a rigorous FB analysis before they are finally delivered. We don't care if someone has an epileptic fit while watching - we just don't want them to turn off.