TubeMogul Industry Analysis

Surprise: Twitter Refers the LEAST Fickle Video Viewers

On average, audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watch a video 36.91% longer than viewers referred by Facebook and 49.98% longer than viewers referred by Digg.

Thursday 16th of July 2009 12:00:00 AM

Social networking and bookmarking sites are obviously an important part of any video campaign, whether you are a music label or an advertiser. Given that audiences vary widely by site, we thought a case study comparing engagement (defined as seconds of video watched before a viewer clicks away) across top social sites might prove interesting.

Methodology
For a three-month period, we recorded a sample of 6,763,690 video streams referred by links from Digg, Facebook and Twitter. For example, if someone sent a Tweet saying "check out this video" and provided a link, we tracked any viewers that clicked the link. The streams hail from six top video sites that average in the billions of streams per month (due to partnership limitations, we cannot disclose which sites).

Results
The results (below) are surprising: on average, viewers referred by Twitter tend to watch a video the longest (one minute, 58 seconds), compared to Facebook (one minute, 14 seconds) and Digg (58 seconds).

Analysis/Conclusions
Despite Twitter's erstwhile reputation as a soapbox for ephemeral thoughts (i.e. "long line at Starbucks...argh!"), the data tells another story: as a platform, Twitter refers among the most engaged video viewers out there.

One possible reason for this might be the fact that the service allows one-way following, which means everyone's feed is hyper-customized, with less noise caused by needless "friend" reciprocation or, in the case of Digg, a crowded homepage. This way, if someone links to a video from Twitter, there is already a built-in selection bias.

Of course, "less fickle" doesn't necessarily translate into "more likely to click on an ad" or "make a purchase," but it does guarantee a brand (say, Red Bull) that a viewer interacted with a given piece of content longer.

Works Cited:

TubeMogul's patent-pending technology and our partners.

For more information, contact:
David Burch, Marketing Manager
david@tubemogul.com
510-653-0501