People Find "How-to" Videos Boring

Bad news for the many venture-backed "how-to" video startups such as eHow and Howcast,: People find their genre less engaging than the average Web video.

Keeping tabs on some 23 million video streams, Web video services firm TubeMogul says that how-to videos lose 15.21% more viewers after 10 seconds and 16.81% more viewers after 20 seconds than the average video.

How-to video firms try to sell their ads at rates much higher than it would cost for marketers to put their ads against average -- apparently more engaging -- Web videos.

In a backwards way, however, the low engagement numbers only reinforce the main advantage for "How-To" videos. Advertisers who pay for their products to be used in how-to videos should feel plenty comfortable knowing that any viewers who manage to suffer through a whole show on how to fry a turkey, for example, are actually very interested in the topic and will likely sometime soon be in the market for whatever tools the host used.

People Find "How-To" Videos Boring