YouTube Steps Up Bid For Eyeball Retention
A recent opinion poll by Lightspeed Research for Oxygen media reported nearly 34% of the women in the age group 18-34 surveyed revealed that logging in at Facebook was the first thing they did every morning, even before brushing their teeth or visiting the washroom. The results are not awesome considering industry statistics show over half the young adults in the age group of 20 to 30 do not brush their teeth early in the morning.
However Facebook’s increasing success at eyeball retention at over 6 hours per day, compared to 2 hours per day for Google, Yahoo and other social media sites, has had others in a tizzy since it was revealed by Nielsen statistics earlier this year.
Facebook’s coup at eyeball retention had ad-men scurrying towards the site where youth would spend a quarter of their lives socializing with friends on the net and which has rapidly overshadowed the popularity of friends at the club. Now YouTube has announced a new format called ‘Leanback’ in which the viewer will be fed HD videos of his or her choice, one after another, so that they do not have to surf the website to select programs of their choice.
In May of this year, Google, the owners of YouTube, battling to retain the largest chunk of online ads, revealed their plan to unleash internet-focused television, with new features of browsing on auto feed without the use of remote when Sony launches its new range of products in the fall this year.
YouTube, though the biggest of the video sites, hopelessly languishes in eyeball retention amongst the video segment, perhaps because it does not look at solutions from the user's point of view. The problem with its thinking is that viewers will never give up the choice to eject dumb program mes from their screens and YouTube has no mechanism in its site to ensure viewer popularity other than celebrity videos.
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