For our latest research, we set out with a simple question: how do people discover videos online? To answer, we used TubeMogul’s video analytics to record what sites viewers are coming from for a sample of 35.5 million streams on six top video sites.
The results? The most common way viewers find a video (45.13% of all views our sample) is intuitive: going to a video site and running a search or clicking around the featured or related videos. In terms of sites referring video views, no single source dominates, with a variegated long tail of mostly blogs sourcing 80.88% of all referred traffic in our sample. Google is the top individual site referring video views at a modest 7.19% of all referred video traffic.
While unlocking a formula for making videos go viral has long been the “El Dorado” of the online marketing world, perhaps this research gives us some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.
