Last updated 26th July 2024
Video marketing is a competitive gig.
Success isn’t just about the content of your video – but also how it’s presented on the page.
Does it stand out? Is it crying out to be clicked?
If the answer is no, you could potentially be missing out on precious video views – and a glorious opportunity to tell your story.
We were really interested to see the results of research carried out by our friends at Wistia. They wanted to find out how a video’s play rate might be affected by the colour of the player window.
Here’s a summary of what they found:
- The default option is most popular among marketers. Wistia’s default player colour is Royal Blue (#1e71e7) and it seems that most people tend to go with what they’re given.
- This doesn’t necessarily translate to a higher play rate. Play rate is defined by Wistia as the number of unique video plays, divided by the number of unique loads. This metric looks less favourable for Royal Blue. The average play rate for the default colour was just 29.2% – in other words, almost seven times out of ten, the video player loaded in Royal Blue, and the viewer chose not to play.
The interesting thing is that Wistia don’t purely hang this significant increase on video player colour. In fact, they believe that it’s because marketers who are customising player colour are also adhering to similar video best practices. In other words, they’re the people who truly optimise their video player for maximum clickability.
It is the combination of all these factors that increase a video’s play rate. But it seems that customizing the player color doesn’t hurt.”
So, which colours actually perform best?
Muted colours, like different shades of grey, tend to be the most popular among marketers, but black had the most unique plays by far.
Closing thoughts
It seems that player colour can make a real difference to the play rate of your video, but this is probably because people who customise the player window are also optimising other essential components of their video.
The bottom line is that you’re probably missing a trick by accepting default options; take the chance to customise your video player to match your branding, and you’re likely to reap the rewards. Take a look at the full findings over on Wistia to find out more!
