Rising above a website or facebook page is the need for ministries to seriously think through their video presence online.
This is from Luke W’s blog:
As online video continues to grow, it’s interesting to see how people are consuming and accessing this medium.
- The average US Internet user watches 182 videos online in a month. (source).
- The duration of the average online video is 3.7 minutes. (source). This is up from 2 minutes 46 seconds in 2008 (source)
- The average video on YouTube (which serves 1 billion videos per day) will get 500 views over time. (source)
- 25% of those views will come in the first four days (source)
- By and large, only the first 30 to 60 seconds of an online video will be watched. (source)
- 45% of views come from direct navigation (search) and the other 55% of the time, people stumble across a video and “discover” it. (source)
These stats reveal a few takeaways for me:
Produce OFTEN!
Clearly the number of videos people are watching is growing, so producing a variety of videos will match the increasing demand for video related content.
Produce like a GANGSTA!
High quality videos are great but if people on average watch only 30-60 seconds then high production quality does not make a lot of sense and could be a poor use of resources (time, money, people).
Set Up a YouTube Channel NOW!
Don’t let your videos sit on individual’s YouTube accounts. Get a channel to bring all your videos to the same place. Create a couple playlists to organize your content.
Brian,
Great post! We’ve really started to see the benefit of using video. We’ll take videos of our weekly meetings (maybe special speakers) and post them online. If we have a funny skit we’ll post that on facebook and tag all the people involved.
We also started to realize that our students and staff have great experience and are great ministry trainers. It would be good for us to video those training times and put them on the web for others to benefit from. If you go to YouTube right now, there’s not much Crusade training content. We’re trying to change that.
In Destino we’re breaking new ground learning how to raise support in the Hispanic community. It’s much easier to video our students sharing how they used different strategies than it is to try and write all of them up. That’s one of our new projects for the Christmas break to get more of these support raising ideas that have worked in the past up for others to benefit from (the letter strategy typically does not provide all the support a student needs for summer project).
Our video setup is pretty simple, but works out great:
*iPhone 4 (records HD video)
*$15 tripod from amazon
*”the glif” tripod mount for iphone 4 (http://www.theglif.com)
*iMovie for Mac to edit (or iPhone iMovie app)
*music from http://www.friendlymusic.com ($1.99 a track)
For under $100 and an iPhone 4 we’re now able to rapidly produce these videos. It generally takes about 1-2 hours per video to go from filming, editing, music selection, and upload. We’re just starting up but you can check them out here: http://www.vimeo.com/aggiedestino
(also, we chose Vimeo over youtube because Youtube has a 10-minute time limit on videos. While most of ours are 2-3 minutes, there are times where we want to put up a longer talk that we think would benefit other Destino movements around the country. That’s just not possible on youtube)
wow eric what you shared can easily be applied to other ministries.
will post on the blogference site to spread the word!
Thanks, guys. This was helpful to think about. Appreciate both the “data” on video usage and the “practical ministry” insights.