How do people discover videos online?
Blogs and direct navigation to video sites, mostly. Google is the top individual site referring video views; also: social networks refer more views than video search engines.
Thursday 12th of February 2009 12:00:00 AM
People discover videos online in a variety of ways, from embeds on blogs to video search engines. But which sources drive the most video views? Our recent acquisition of TubeMogul InPlay, which tracks rich video statistics, allows us to answer that question.
Methodology
The most common way viewers find a video (45.13% of all views our sample) is direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and running a search or clicking around the featured or related videos).
In terms of sites referring traffic, no single source dominates, with a variegated long tail of mostly blogs sourcing 80.88% of all referred traffic in our sample. Here are the top 20 individual referrers:
For a two-month period, we recorded inbound URLs for a sample of 35,528,837 video streams from six top video sites (due to partnership limitations, we cannot disclose which sites). For instance, if someone executed a Google text search and clicked on a link to a video, we recorded that inbound link as coming from Google. Views from embedded videos were also included in the sample.
Results
In terms of sites referring traffic, no single source dominates, with a variegated long tail of mostly blogs sourcing 80.88% of all referred traffic in our sample. Here are the top 20 individual referrers:
| Site | Share of Video Referrals |
| 7.19% | |
| yahoo | 2.12% |
| 1.93% | |
| myspace | 1.55% |
| digg | 1.49% |
| stumbleupon | 1.13% |
| msn/live | 0.92% |
| blogspot | 0.78% |
| aol | 0.43% |
| 0.29% | |
| truveo | 0.22% |
| flurl | 0.21% |
| blinkx | 0.19% |
| ask | 0.19% |
| comcast | 0.16% |
| 0.15% | |
| wordpress | 0.15% |
| cnn | 0.12% |
| wikipedia | 0.11% |
| ovguide | 0.06% |
Since there were millions of referring sites in our sample, manually compiling a full breakdown by category was untenable. However, since there are a limited number of players in certain sectors, we were able to infer the following breakdown of share of referral traffic by category:
- Search engines: 11.18%
- Social networks: 3.66%
- Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%
- Video search engines: 0.63%
- Email/IM: 0.05%
- Everything else (almost all blogs, from the thousands we scanned): 80.88% of all referred traffic.
Analysis/Conclusions
These results likely come as bad news to the myriad sites that are set up with online video discovery in mind, such as video search engines, which source a relatively modest 0.63% of all referred video views.
To those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, perhaps this gives some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video's meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.
Works Cited:
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TubeMogul's patent-pending technology and our partners.
For more information, contact:
David Burch, Marketing Manager
david@tubemogul.com
510-653-0501