Who's Streaming Video, How Are People Finding It, And How Do The Ads Get Served?

YouTube aside, broadcast TV networks and "pure-play" online media brands are presently winning the online video wars, according to a new study by video distribution and analytics startup Tubemogul in conjunction with video platform Brightcove. In their wake lie magazine sites and music labels, and further behind, newspaper sites.

During the first quarter of the year, the Broadcast TV networks sampled in the study streamed 380 million videos, with Web media brands trailing right behind with 326 million video streams.

How are consumers finding these videos? The majority -- 51.75% -- are navigating directly from the publisher's main site, according to the joint report. Google is the next biggest driver of video-viewing traffic at 38.92% -- followed by Yahoo, at 5.58% and Bing, at 2.29%.

While a force in virtually every other Web-related area, Facebook is presently responsible for driving just 0.40% of video traffic online.

Compared to search engines and other social media sites, Twitter referrals generate the highest level of consumer engagement for online video content from broadcast networks, magazine publishers and music labels. Newspaper publishers, meanwhile, see the highest level of engagement from viewers who find their content via Yahoo.

In their favor, newspaper and magazine publishers now have the greatest number of video players across online media properties, while newspaper publishers show the most growth in video production for online properties -- followed by broadcast networks and pure-play Web media brands.

In-stream video advertising is the dominant ad format followed by overlays, sponsorships, companions and player skins. Indeed, despite experimentation with other ad formats, 35% of survey respondents said in-stream video advertising produced the most revenue for their media business compared to other ad formats.

For in-stream advertising, respondents said the dominant insertion point is pre-roll, followed by post-roll, player load and mid-roll. Also, more than half of the survey respondents indicated that they would add sponsorships to their monetization strategy for online video this year.

What's more, close to 70% of respondents said their media companies sell their own advertising versus using an ad network. While just over 10% of respondents said they currently distribute ad-supported video content to mobile devices, more than 50% said they will roll out ad-supported mobile video within the next twelve months.

The data used for the analysis included in this report was taken from a cross-section sample of Brightcove customers representing media industry verticals.

Online Video Streams/Quarter

2 comments about "Who's Streaming Video, How Are People Finding It, And How Do The Ads Get Served?".
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  1. Darren Davis from Artisan News Service, May 7, 2010 at 9:32 a.m.

    How can you leave YouTube out of this conversation? Outlets are going where the viewers are, and they're on YouTube. Some of the others like music labels, newspapers and magazines lack in your report because they're going with YouTube. Examine the source of this data and their relationships right now. Otherwise, Gavin, love your stuff and read your work often!

  2. Mike Darnell from Treepodia, May 10, 2010 at 10:47 a.m.

    Hi Gavin,

    Great post - although I agree with Darren that leaving Youtube out of it is a bit like ignoring the elephant in the room. AFAIK they account for ~40% of the market...

    It's interesting to see how Facebook are so behind in terms of video. A service with their level of adoption should account for more than %0.40 even without trying! I think it speaks volumes for the relatively poor experiences Facebook delivers in terms of video viewing and upload. I'm pretty certain that if/when they choose to address these issues their market share will improve dramatically almost immediately.

    Although I'm hardly what you'd call objective, your post provides further validation for our Video Distributor product, which syndicates etailers' product videos to video sharing sites (Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, etc.). What we're seeing is consumers searching for, and learning about the products on the video sites, and then coming in to the vendors' sites to perform their purchases.

    Cheers,
    Mike
    http://Treepodia.com
    The ecommerce video solution

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