Figure 1

Behavioral engagement in “experimental” cohort mimics “real-world” behavior. (a) Viewership survival, shown for an example video, is measured as the fraction of the initial number of viewers who are retained over time. “Real-world” data (continuous line) was provided for this study by its content owner, StoryCorps, and represents the viewership (239,511 views) accumulated over several years for this video. “Experimental” survival (dashed line) was collected in approximately one hour from 1000 viewers recruited online via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. (b) Variation in engagement across time correlates between real-world and experimental data (r = 0.60, p = 0.002, N = 77). Engagement was estimated using a time interval of ∆t = 12 s for the five videos that were common to both conditions. Dashed line indicates points with equal engagement in both data-sets. (c) Experimental engagement correlated with the likelihood that a separate cohort of viewers voluntarily continued to watch the videos when given the option to stop. Dashed line represents the regression line. In both b and c each point represents a time interval, color represents the corresponding time point in the video from a, and engagement is displayed on a log-seconds scale. Still images from “Sundays at Rocco’s”, a StoryCorps animated short directed by the Rauch Brothers and produced by Lizzie Jacobs and Mike Rauch, reproduced here with permission from StoryCorps. We would additionally like to acknowledge StoryCorps for providing us with their YouTube analytics data and their animated interviews as video stimuli. These interviews were recorded by StoryCorps and are provided courtesy of StoryCorps, a national not-for-profit corporation dedicated to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and created a more just and compassionate world. www.storycorps.org. This figure is not covered by the CC BY license. Credits to StoryCorps in panel a. All rights reserved, used with permission.