Immersion's Value Measurement output predicted total views of the talks in our sample (correlation 0.37). Importantly, the number of views was highly responsive to our Value Score.
A 10% increase in Value Score would result in 16% more online views of a talk.
A January, 2018 report pegs the median number of views for over 2,500 TED talks at 1.1 million, so a speaker who improved value for their audience by 10% would get in 176,000 more views—quite a substantial effect.
Peak value and neurologic frustration (points of significantly low value) were similar for all talks, with the expected negative association between low value and views (correlation -0.21).
TED does not report how long one must watch a talk to count as a "view", but YouTube uses "around 30 seconds" while Facebook counts seeing three seconds of content as a view. If TED included a minimum watching time, the actual number of views for many talks would fall. Our previous research indicates that significantly low points where people are getting little value from an experience will cause them to stop viewing content. This means that TED talks with low value have much less impact.
In order to understand what makes TED talks great, we examined the longest moments of peak value. Across the seven talks, we found 18 peak periods of 24 seconds or longer. These varied from one peak moment for Brené Brown and Jason Seiken to five for Tony Robbins.
Speakers created deeply valuable moments for viewers when they shared authentic personal stories, when something completely unexpected happened, and during calls to action, telling the audience things they could do to improve their lives.
