Brain Food

Broadcast Survey

Posted Eli

Personally, I have a very hard time paying attention to Actual Play sessions if they last more than an hour. I’ve noticed the AP broadcasts for my Savage Worlds setting, The Blackwood, typically last between 3-4 hours (with one monstrous 6-hour outlier). I wanted to find out what most people prefer when it comes to broadcast length, so I created a poll with a single question:

As a viewer, what’s the ideal length of a single session of play on YouTube or a podcast?

(Full Disclosure: I’m not all that familiar with constructing, administering, and analyzing surveys.)

I chose six communities for my survey, with a mixture between G+ and Facebook:

This amounts to a total potential survey population of 16,988 people. Please note that the “active” populations in each community are far smaller than the number of overall members. Please also note that population numbers are reflective of when I ran the survey, from April 27th, 2016 to April 29th, 2016.

In total, there were 285 responses between the six communities. That’s only 1.68% of the total potential population, but again: most group members aren’t active in the community. Here’s a look at the data:

  • Less than an hour: 14.39% of respondents (41 people)
  • 1-2 hours: 21.4% of respondents (61 people)
  • 2-3 hours: 23.16% of respondents (66 people)
  • 3-4 hours: 36.84% of respondents (105 people)
  • 4+ hours: 4.21% of respondents (12 people)

It’s worth mentioning that the G+ respondents could only select one option, while the Facebook communities were able to pick as many as they wanted. I didn’t collect data on multiple responses.

Observations

Based solely on the data, it seems 3 hours is the sweet spot for an AP broadcast, capturing 60% of respondents. If you’d like to see the raw data, you can check out my spreadsheet here. I told people they should feel free to leave comments elaborating on their choices, so I’ve compiled some of the more popular observations too:

  • Facebook prefers longer sessions, while G+ prefers shorter sessions. Separate from this survey, the plight of finding time amidst family and work is a common refrain in the G+ communities, whereas it’s far less common on Facebook. I suspect this is because the G+ community tends to be a little older on average.
  • Several commenters (particularly on G+) listen to episodes in 30-40 minute chunks on their commute, so overall length wasn’t a critical issue for them.
  • Many respondents said their patience for a show/episode can vary wildly depending on player engagement, GM skill, and audio quality.
  • A few people said they can listen to an audio-only episode longer than a video, because the video is a more active form of participation. Some people said they could listen to audio for several hours but can only watch a video for 10-15 minutes.

So what do you all think? As a viewer, what are your preferences about episode length? Do you prefer video or audio? If you’re a creator yourself, have you noticed a correlation between episode length and view count? This is all pretty new to me, so I’m eager to learn from you all.

2 thoughts on “Broadcast Survey”

  1. Minor thought: some of your respondents may be active in more than one group. Also, you can’t really tell if those choosing 2-3 didn’t mean 2 or that those choosing 3-4 didn’t mean 4.

    1. Thanks for the comment, Richard! You’re totally right: there’s a lot of overlap between many of the groups. I suspect people wouldn’t answer the survey more than once (at least, *I* wouldn’t), but there’s no way to be certain. You’re right also about the variability in the possible responses I provided. As far as that goes, I tried to draw each conclusion from more than one answer. For example: I settled on 3 hours as the sweet spot because most of the responders said either “2-3 hours” or “3-4 hours.” 3 hours is a good average of those two responses. Still though, I admit it’s a highly informal study.

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