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Unfortunately for video discovery technology companies, social networks now refer more consumers to online videos than video search engines, according to new research from video deployment, syndication and tracking service TubeMogul.
"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," according to the report, which recorded inbound URLs for a sample of 35,528,837 video streams from six top video sites over a two-month period.
The most common way that viewers find videos is direct navigation to a video site. Indeed, a full 45.13% of all video views were complete by consumers who go to YouTube, for example, and run a search--or click 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 about 80% of all referred traffic, according to the Emeryville, Calif.-based company.
That finding was what most struck the report's author and TubeMogul Marketing Manager, David Burch. "I thought Google and the video hosting sites were going to make up a much larger share," said Burch. "I was really surprised to find that the long tail is so long."
Leading the top 20 individual referrers, Google was responsible for 7.19% of all referrals. In second, Yahoo was responsible for 2.12% of all referrals, closely followed by Facebook with a 1.93% share, and then MySpace with a 1.55% share.
The social bookmarking aggregation specialists Digg and Stumbleupon accounted for a 1.49% share and a 1.13% share, respectively.
All accounting for less than a 1% share, other top referrers included MSN/Live, Blogspot, AOL, Reddit, Truveo, Flurl, blinkx and Ask.
By category, search engines were responsible for 11.18% of all video referrals, followed by social networks with a 3.66% share of all referrals.
Next came social bookmarking aggregation sites with a 3.19%, followed by video search engines and email/IM services with a 0.63% and 0.05% share, respectively.
For those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, TubeMogul recommended reaching out to bloggers and optimizing a video's metadata to ensure that it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.
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This is really fascinating though -- people are increasingly relying on social networks to share and find video. I'm excited to hear that, because we built our company on the notion that brands distributing video content should be reaching their audiences on social networks where the intent and tools make it intuitive to share that video with friends and engage further with the brand.
I'll definitely second what the TubeMogul team found -- we've seen large communities of viewers and enthusiasts build movements on FaceBook around simple video clips. Whether it's helping Kiva.org win $300,000 or helping Nissan launch it's 370Z
Here's the details on the Kiva story: http://www.involver.com/case_studies.html
Tyler Willis tyler@involver.com