Where Do People Discover Videos Online? Online Video Discovery Research
There are many ways in which people discover video online; videos embedded on blogs, video search engines, major search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN), email, and social networking, to name a few. In February, our friends over at Tubemogul released some new research which helps to answer the question, "Where do people discover video online and which sources drive the most video views?"
According to the research, most internet users discover video on blogs and through direct navigation to the major online video destination sites. Google was the top individual site for referring video views. Additionally, more videos were discovered via social networks than via the search engines dedicated to video discovery (like blinkx, truveo, etc...).
SEE ALSO: Prime Time & Long-Form Online Video Is Up, Says Yahoo! Research
So, is this bad news for the video search engines?
The sites included are all dedicated to video and are big names you've heard of, so any extrapolations on video discovery should be limited to that context.
The biggest video search engines are the video sites themselves. As we reported late last year, Youtube is itself one of the largest search engines when you look at the number of queries searched.
As David Burch, Marketing Manager for Tubemogul points out, the results present "a compelling case for long-tail bloggers in terms of getting a video discovered"
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.
Here are the results of their Study:
The most common way in which videos were discovered (45.13% of all views our sample) was through 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 that refer traffic to videos, no single source dominated. However 80.88 percent of those sources were blogs.
| 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% |
- 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.
What Is This 144p Stuff, YouTube?
Quick Tip: How To Get YouTube Thumbnail Images
List of Video Sharing Web Sites and Destination Sites Like YouTube - Share Your Videos
How Do the Most-Subscribed YouTube Channels Achieve Success? [Study]
Maker Is Creating Video Destination Site, Doesn't Plan on Killing YouTube
Skittles Lets You Decide Which Figurine Dies in Latest Wacky Ad
How To Watch Banned or Blocked Youtube Videos
