Why No One Watches Your Sermons Online--and 3 Ways How to Change This

[James Nored]

We Need to Change the Stories We Tell Ourselves (from Ruth) from James Nored on Vimeo.

Churches, ministers, pastors, and church administrators go to the time and trouble of posting sermons online each week on websites and social media sites. And almost no one watches. Why is this? 

Quite simply, because online attention spans are incredibly short. Most people simply will not watch a 30 minute sermon online. Or a 25 minute sermon. Or a 22 minute sermon. Or even a 10 minute sermon.

So how do you change this? Here are three simple ways.

1. Create a 1-2 minute sermon highlight clip.  The above clip is an example of a sermon highlight clip. It actually would be better if it were closer to 1 minute, but a good clip can go a couple of minutes. (But the longer it is, the less likely people will click on it.)
   
   
2. Make the sermon highlight clips have an emotional appeal that appeals to the right brain with passion, music, b roll. This means, high a sermon highlight where you are really getting into it. Nothing impacts people today like passion.
   
   Adding background music with some b roll, like this clip does, automatically draws people in and draws upon the natural right brain strength of the video medium. Remember, today, it is a right-brained world! 
   
   
3. Embed the sermon highlight clip natively into Facebook and make it autoplay on blogs or websites. Research has shown that when a video clip is uploaded natively to Facebook, rather than just posted as a Youtube or Vimeo link, there is a far higher play rate, as the clip automatically plays. As more and Facebook traffic moves to mobile, this bias towards native Facebook videos will grow even more.
   
   A similar kind of effect can be created by embedding the video with "autoplay" on websites and blog posts.

Because of the short online attention span, on our church website, many of the "sermons" that are highlighted and embedded on our sermon/video page are of these short highlight videos, with links to the full sermon messages. When someone is "trying out" a church/preacher, these clips are enough for them to get a taste, plus they can have a bit more of a culturally typical experience with background music (and b roll, when it is available)--and they can watch the full sermons if they like.

What do you think of the sermon highlight clip concept? What additional information or tools do you need to do this? What are the benefits? What are the barriers? How else could the short online attention span be solved?