Content time spent

The Content time spent metric reports the total seconds of active main-content playback per session, excluding ads, pauses, buffering, and stalls. Use it as the engagement metric for content viewing; for time spent including ads, see Media time spent.

How this metric is calculated

The media backend sums the elapsed wall-clock time between events while the player is in the play state on main content. Time during ads, pauses, buffer events, and stalls is excluded. Because only active play time is counted, the metric can exceed Content length when a viewer seeks backward and re-watches a segment. Each pass through a given segment accumulates additional play time, and can accrue for as long as the user consumes and rewinds content in a session. The metric is reported on the close call. The value is shown as HH:MM:SS in Analysis Workspace and in seconds in Data Feeds, Data Warehouse, and Reporting APIs.