Engaging an audience with no time for it…

Steve Safran of Lost Remote posted a fascinating piece this morning entitled “PodCast Math - We don’t know what we don’t know” His launching point was a discussion of the ZeFrank vs Andrew Baron controversy we’ve discussed on these pages and Scoble has on others, but the real gist of the argument was that because we can’t say authoritatively that an individual, once they’ve downloaded an audio or video podcast, we have no true measure of viewership or listenership.

We don’t know if they’ve downloaded it to their iPod and never bothered to listen. We don’t know if they started to watch, but didn’t quite finish the broadcast. Or maybe they fell asleep half way through the podcast (which has happened to me on MOST audio podcasts, which bore me to tears for the most part).

This is an issue that is near and dear to my heart as I struggle to get ZBIZ.TV off the ground, which I launched back on September 17th. Its launch coincided with Scoble’s launch of ScobleShow, which ALSO interviews geeks and entrepreneurs in lengthy video interviews. Neither of us has set the world on fire. I think both of us suffer from the same problem: our interviews are too damn long and people’s attention spans (or time schedules) run out.

Contrast this to my favorite videoblog, Beet.TV. They have short, quick, to the point stories with video interviews with industry heavy hitters that last no more than 2-5 minutes. Andy Plesser, who runs Beet.TV, is no Robert Scoble, but you would never know it if you compared their Alexa numbers:

But people LOVE Scobleizer, Robert Scoble’s written blog in contrast:

I think it gets down to what you can scan or view quickly. Unless you want to watch an hour episode of “Kidnapped”, as I did the other night, most folks are not going to sit down and watch half hour to one hour video content online. And btw, I gladly tolerate the ads, as they are a mere 10 seconds long. Big deal.

Ze Frank and Rocketboom are each only about 3 minutes long per episode, so BOTH have a higher degree of engagement than any other video content online, regardless of who gets more comments than the other.

My bottom line: I don’t think we’ll ever have a true measure of engagement, though there are all sorts of little indicators we could try along the way that could point to higher engagement. They’ve never really cracked this nut on network TV and they’ve had 50 years to do it.

What makes us think we’ll be able to handle this on the net any better than they have?