• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 12, 2010

What's going on with Vevo, the music video site launched by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media Company in December? After a bumpy start, the site pulled in 226 million video views in its first full month in January, according to new data from Brightcove and video analytics firm TubeMogul.

That figure was ten times the 23 million views individual artist and label sites drew during the same period. Counting views coming from its YouTube channel, TubeMogul's David Burch said Vevo is now the most-trafficked video site.

Music video is the first topic Brightcove and TubeMogul are examining in what will be a series of quarterly reports analyzing different video industry segments. Brightcove says it's well-suited to the initial subject as the Web video platform behind the four major music labels -- Sony, Universal, Warner Music Group and EMI Music -- powering hundreds of label and artist sites and portals.

While individual artist and label sites don't attract the traffic as video-sharing sites, the study found they generate higher levels of engagement. Average viewing time across Brightcove-hosted artist/ label sites was one minute, 51 seconds compared to one minute, 12 seconds for syndicated video sites such as YouTube. (YouTube separately powers video on Vevo.)

What role does social media play in connection with music videos? People watching videos sent via Twitter averaged 2:30 minutes per stream compared to the 1:30 minutes viewed on average by consumers finding music videos via search engines like Yahoo, according to the research. However, 76% of music videos viewed on artist and label sites are found through Google searches.

"For now, the data points to the fact that consumer interest in online music video content remains high, and the rise of mobile video and outlets like Twitter and Facebook will surely help artists and labels around the world to increase customer engagement with their video content in the future," read a TubeMogul blog post Monday.

On a global scale, the study found that the biggest share of online music video views come from the U.S. at 40%, followed by Japan (10%), the U.K. (9%) and Germany (3%).