The influence of visual salience on video consumption behavior: A survival analysis approach

Abstract

In an increasingly competitive media environment, producers of online content need analytics that can predict the success of a video. In recent years the field of visual computation has produced a variety of mathematical models that quantify an image's salience, that is, its potential to capture attention. To test how a video's content might predict its success, we applied the standard saliency model of Itti, Koch, and Niebur [1] to more than 1000 video clips that were broadcast on a large video streaming website. We also obtained fine-grained data on the viewership of these clips. Based on a survival analysis, we find that people prefer more salient videos. The results were robust towards the inclusion of other predictors such as the genre of the video, but not to video length, which remains correlated with salience even after comparing videos only within show and genre. Our analyses suggest that visual salience provides an objective and easy-to-compute supplement to previously suggested predictors of video consumption behavior.