I think the better videos are more likely to be e-mailed from one satisfied viewer to several friends, and I would suspect that might have something to do with the increased number of plays.

“One last wish” actually did quite well despite being played on our then new Brightcove set up. It had 747 plays for 1,522 minutes downloaded. If you do the math the click out rate is fairly low. That being said it is roughly in the top 20 of videos as far as minutes downloaded. The funeral for a local pastor who had served the same church and community for 30 years that same month broke into our top 10 with 2,369 minutes downloaded.

Up until last week 3,000 minutes were our best performers although a local county high school District Trustee kicked and punched a protestor and the new ceiling is now 10,000+ minutes downloaded.

The problem as many of us have noted is that quality takes time. The other problem is that quality does not always fit into the current economic model. That being said, I know that many of us video/multimedia/photo journalists will keep preaching the “gospel” until they ask us to turn out the lights.

I am hopeful, partly because I have to be, that ultimately the tide will change. Good storytelling, fundamental journalism, work that elicits emotion has worth. Newspapers are just trying to figure out where and how right now. I guess my job is to keep doing good work and encourage our staff to keep doing solid journalism.

Video is rarely the most efficient way to deliver information. Niche-identification adds value by raising the “Return on Attention”.

How were the “minutes downloaded” on it?

A two-part reply.

The metrics I measure, keep and eye on and share weekly with the staff are minutes downloaded. If use that with click out rates, I can generally tell what videos people watch and can tell why. We had been steadily growing minutes downloaded for the past seven months.

Part of what we serve are the quick hit spot news video, but we have slowly moving away from that toward longer form (2 minute) profile, event, news and character driven pieces.

Part two is what keeps me up at night. If folks haven’t read the Xark post on the “10 reasons newspapers won’t reinvent news” they should go and do that right now. It the basis for whatever news/photo/video/multimedia journalism manifesto I may write in the future.

Right now papers are trying to save the print version and they are pulling resources from the web (ie. the future) to survive the present without thinking about how this impacts the future.

So any conversation about video or video’s place at newspapers needs to address part two and how we live, tell stories and report in this environment.

There is no doubt in my mind that video holds a place at newspapers. There are some stories that just scream to be told in video. I did a daily quick project, the hand grip on the camera was broken, don’t ask but this email went out: “When I read today’s centerpiece on the Hinojosa family’s struggle to make it to graduation, I imagined readers all over town tearing up as they read it. I didn’t expect the video could match it. I was wrong. After you’ve seen the print package, check out the video in our new video player.”

That is why video can be important at a newspaper.

Much has been written about commitment and loyalty to online sites. You can abandon your online community with few or no consequences — all you do is quit going there. Geographic communities are different. Even if you don’t like it, it’s still where you are.

A lot of what people do with video online is about “voluntary associations,” as you said. It’s kind of like the old saying, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives.” Online, it’s all friends — and no relatives.

If you’re seeing thousands of views, at a site of your size, then I guess you can imagine that some decent number of people watch to the end. But if the numbers are down in the low hundreds, and some number of those are certainly “Watch 10 seconds and quit,” then I’d want to re-examine the resource allocation — if I were you.