That's not a lot in terms of pop music videos, but for a woodblock printmaker, I think it's just fine! And we're learning that our videos are not just 'for the moment'. They get steady attention month after month. A number of the ones I uploaded last year are now well over 20,000 views each, and one is over 85,000!

But there is another important statistic relevant to these YouTube videos, and that is the one that they call 'audience retention'. A lot of people might click to start a video, but how many make it to the end?

Well, YouTube provides statistics on this sort of thing. Here's the retention graph for the most recent video prior to this new one:

Now at first glance, this looks pretty bad - 50% of the viewers have bailed out before we even get to the two minute mark! But a bit of reflection puts a better light on it.

A great many of the people originally clicking the 'play' button on this video were people who had been watching another video on YouTube, and when that was finished, clicked on this one - which was presented to them automatically by the YouTube software in the 'suggested' videos that always show when one has finished playing.

For the most part, these were people without any inherent interest in woodblock printmaking, and it is most of these people who disappeared in the first minute. "Eh? What's this? No thanks ..."

But to me, the really interesting thing about that retention graph is that once the casual 'drive-by' viewers were taken out of the equation, everybody else stayed, pretty much right to the end. The graph is almost perfectly flat all the way along. And this is nearly fifteen minutes long - an eternity in YouTube terms, where they recommend that we keep it 'under five minutes in length' at most, or 'you'll lose your audience'.

So this tells me that we're offering pretty good content. To hold somebody's eyeballs for fifteen minutes - when the whole internet is just a click away - is doing very well indeed, I think!

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