One of the biggest surprises we’ve seen so far in the business is the attention span of our Giant Bomb video audience. Our internal tool, Metrimatics, tells us how many people start a video, make it to the middle and make it to the end. Here’s the graph from the last 30 days:

So I wasn’t able to get the percentages in the screen grab, but it breaks down like this: 68% of the people who started a video at Giant Bomb finished the video. That might not sound all the impressive until we tell you our average video is over 10 minutes. When we look at these metrics, we start to wonder why we are so worried about dropping in a 15-second ad. Compared to TV, we would still be giving our audience a tremendous amount of value for their entertainment dollar/time.

From a programming perspective, we’ve also been blown away by the desire of our audience to watch episodic content online. For example, we are doing an “Endurance Run” where Jeff and Vinny are playing this PS2 game called Persona 4, which has something like 72 hours of game play in it. So every day, we push 20 minutes of video game play with voice over commentary “Mystery Science 3000″-style. It has turned into one of our most popular, and interactive content features on the site. I’ve embedded the 34th episode below.

Once we saw this data, we immediately re-focused on video content and saw an immediate impact on visits and returns. Our other brands are really stepping up their video as well to similar results. It’s been great to watch.