What social media site refers the best video viewer engagement?
Social networking and bookmarking sites are a critical part of any online marketing effort utilizing video because you need to get your video seen where your key demographic is spending time online.
TubeMogul recently completed a research case study to find exactly what the title of this post asks: what social media site refers the least fickle viewers? They sampled 6,763,690 video streams over three months referred by links from Digg, Facebook and Twitter to come up with the findings. I’m going to highlight a few of the real key points to talk about but here’s the link to read the full results from their research report.
Results from TubeMogul
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).
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.
My Analysis
This is an interesting study and the numbers are intriguing but there are a few things that the study doesn’t take into account.
Separation of social media sites & social bookmarking sites
I would have liked to have seen Twitter and Facebook (possibly even MySpace and LinkedIn too) go head to head and Digg go up against other bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, etc. My reason for this is that typically you are more connected with people on social media sites than on social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites are cluttered with millions of links people are sharing with others they may not even know. So it’s a less direct form of sharing than say Twitter or Facebook where you (usually) have a more established relationship with the possible viewer clicking your link. Most bookmarking sites have a lot of users who are lightly “browsing” content and clicking on something that may sound interesting but then quickly clicking away if their interest isn’t peaked. On Facebook for instance if I share a video, only people who have some sort of relationship with me are going to see it and are therefore more likely to watch more of the video. So it would have been nice to see a comparison of apples to apples.
Yes its video…but what is the content?
This may seem like a stupid question but if 75% of the videos profiled were of a cat playing the piano…what does that actually tell you? It would have been great to cull out the user generated content and just focus on videos that have some sort of at least a vague marketing purpose, whether its a direct sell on down to the nebulous but humorous branding video. I realize this is nearly impossible to achieve, however including all that user generated content as part of the research definitely skews the numbers. Let’s face it…if you upload a video of your dog barking at the TV – you don’t really care how many people watch it to completion but if you put a branding video online with a call to action – that’s information you want to know.
Time of day comparisons
Just like email marketing where you have better days of the week or times of day to send your email to get ideal open rates or click through rates, social media works much the same way. It would have been interesting to see over a three month period what days of the week and hours of the day had higher engagement rates.
What the numbers tell me
Ultimately the numbers don’t matter. Well…they matter but its a giant brush stroke of the entire social media space, not necessarily YOUR demographic and how THEY are engaging in social media. So you have to keep this in mind when you delve into these numbers. If the key demographic you market to is predominantly on MySpace but you are just sharing your video link on Twitter because this research report told you to – you could be missing your mark.
Personally over the past 3 months, SmartMarket Media has had better engagement rates from LinkedIn (2 minutes 35 seconds) followed by Twitter (2 minutes 32 seconds), Facebook (1 minute, 40 seconds), (StumbleUpon (0 minutes, 45 seconds) and Digg (0 minutes, 37 seconds). Obviously we have a much smaller sampling (hundreds of visitors rather than millions) but it just goes to show you need to know your customer base and engage where they are engaging.
What do you think? What do these numbers tell you?
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Comparing Video Sharing Sites
We all know that YouTube is the gorilla in the room but is it the right video sharing site for you? Maybe you’re a video blogger? Maybe you like to create short “How To” videos?
Luckily there are niche video sharing sites for virtually every type of video content out there. More than I could possibly profile here. Thanks to TubeMogul Research & Quantcast for providing much of the data needed for this profile. Here’s my breakdown with statistics and demographics for 15 of the more popular sites in alphabetical order:
5 Min.com
Description: Short “How-To” videos (under “5min”) that answer practical questions.
Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%
Age Demographic: 17% – 12-17 yrs / 33% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable
Monthly US Traffic: 366,ooo
Blip.tv
Description: Publisher-friendly video sharing and distribution site with an integrated video blogging platform.
Gender Demographic: Male 57% / Female 43%
Age Demographic: 33% – 18-34 yrs / 33% – 35-49 yrs / 28% – 50+ yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 1.8 million
Monthly US Traffic: 766,000
Brightcove
Description: Great quality video with an easy to use, quick, user interface. Largely high-income and college-educated users.
Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%
Age Demographic: Evenly distributed between 18-34 yrs and 35-49 yrs age brackets.
Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable
Monthly US Traffic: 1.9 million
** Should be noted that Brightcove is no longer a video sharing site (as mentioned in the comments) as of December 2008 and now is focused exclusively as a video hosting and distribution platform since January 2009. You can utilize their platform to upload to sharing sites such as Veoh.**
Crackle
Description: Easy to use but video quality could be better particularly since it is positioned as a multi-platform next-generation video network owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%
Age Demographic: 19% – 12-17 yrs / 39% – 18-34 yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable
Monthly US Traffic: 2.5 million
Dailymotion
Description: Dubbed the “YouTube of Europe,” it’s a fairly simple and straight forward user interface but hasn’t developed a real community in the US…yet.
Gender Demographic: Male 59% / Female 41%
Age Demographic: 12% – 12-17 yrs / 40% – 18-34 yrs / 29% – 35-49 yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 48.2 million
Monthly US Traffic: 7.2 million
Google Video
Description:Why would you go to Google Video when there is (and Google owns) YouTube? Poor video quality leave this a brand for video search, not really for new video discovery.
Gender Demographic: Male 53% / Female 47%
Age Demographic: 26% – 12-17 yrs / 32% – 18-34 yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable
Monthly US Traffic: 7.5 million
Metacafe
Description:One of the world’s largest video sites that specializes in short form video content from both new emerging talent and Hollywood’s heavy hitters. Uniquely controlled by the user community so if you have a good community, you can get your videos on the front page.
Gender Demographic: Male 58% / Female 42%
Age Demographic: 16% – 12-17 yrs / 36% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 43.5 million
Monthly US Traffic: 13 million
Motionbox
Description: One of the few video sharing sites that offers an option to securely share your videos with friends & family. After AOL Video shut down, they recommended their users to transfer their videos to Motionbox.
Gender Demographic: Male 52% / Female 48%
Age Demographic: 26% – 18-34 yrs / 31% – 35-49 yrs / 23% – 50+ yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 268,000
Monthly US Traffic: 144,000
Revver
Description: Revver pretty much started revenue sharing for video content providers. They connect makers, sharers, and sponsors of internet video in a free and open marketplace that rewards them for doing what they do best.
Gender Demographic: Male 57% / Female 43%
Age Demographic: 36% – 18-34 yrs / 30% – 35-49 yrs / 23% – 50+ yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable
Monthly US Traffic: 779,000
Ustream.tv
Description: Live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.
Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%
Age Demographic: 34% – 18-34 yrs / 33% – 35-49 yrs / 22% – 50+ yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 6.6 million
Monthly US Traffic: 1.4 million
Veoh
Description:Focused on full-screen video programming for anyone with a broadband connection. Site lacks a sense of social community.
Gender Demographic: Male 56% / Female 44%
Age Demographic: evenly distributed audience across all age brackets.
Monthly Global Traffic: 12 million
Monthly US Traffic: 4 million
Viddler
Description:Coolest player interface with features like comments tied to a particular time in the video and automatic webcam synch.
Gender Demographic: Male 56% / Female 44%
Age Demographic: 39% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs / 20% – 50+ yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 2.1 million
Monthly US Traffic: 726,000
Vimeo
Description:Completely user-generated content used heavily by videobloggers and podcasters. Really quick upload and very hip interface. Largely high-income and college-educated users.
Gender Demographic: Male 65% / Female 35%
Age Demographic: N/A
Monthly Global Traffic: 9.5 million
Monthly US Traffic: 3.6 million
Yahoo! Video
Description: Entertainment-oriented video site. Unfortunately not yet fully integrated with all of Yahoo!’s community destinations and so really missing out on the social aspect to their service.
Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%
Age Demographic: 16% – 12-17 yrs / 41% – 18-34 yrs / 25% – 35-49 yrs / 16% – 50+ yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 3.2 million
Monthly US Traffic: 1.8 million
YouTube
Description: Unless you live under a rock you know who YouTube is. Their strong user base and community offers the greatest opportunity to both go viral in a big way…but also to get lost quickly.
Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%
Age Demographic: 19% – 12-17 yrs / 36% – 18-34 yrs / 23% – 35-49 yrs / 19% – 50+ yrs
Monthly Global Traffic: 80.6 million
Monthly US Traffic: 69.3 million
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How do people discover videos online?
Once again TubeMogul has released some pretty awesome statistical analysis regarding how people find videos online, from embeds on blogs to video search engines. For a two-month period, they recorded inbound URLs for a sample of over 35 million video streams from six top video sites. But which sources drive the most video views? For the full report from TubeMogul Industry Analysis, continue reading here. Here are some of the highlighted statistics that I found truly interesting:
45% of viewers find a video by direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and searching or clicking around the featured or related videos).
No surprise here given that over 10 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute that going directly to the video sharing sites and searching would be the top method of finding videos.
In terms of individual web sites referring traffic, no single source dominated, here are the top 20 individual referrers:
| 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% |
However, since there are a limited number of players in certain areas online, TubeMogul was able to infer that:
- 11.18% of all traffic comes from search engines
- 3.66% comes from social networks
- 3.19% comes from social bookmarking sites
- 0.63% derives from video search engines
- 0.05% is directed from Email/IM
- 80.88% makes up the rest of the referred traffic…of this mix it is almost completely made up of blogs from the thousands of different blogs they scanned.
Here are the really interesting facts here:
Digg beats StumbleUpon by nearly 0.4% for video referrals
I wouldn’t have guessed that. When I share videos on both social bookmarking sites my traffic from StumbleUpon is nearly triple the traffic I receive from Digg. StumbleUpon is my #4 traffic source for the website (which of course does include my blog posts) bringing in 9.97% of my site traffic while Digg is my #10 source of traffic (also including my blog posts) accounting for about 3.85% of all my site traffic. About half of my bookmarks are for videos while the other half are for blog posts (possibly even this one will end up on both). Of course this is just me and I am not profiling over 35 million videos for my statistics.
0.05% is directed from Email/IM
This I find staggering to be so low. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get people to share your videos is through email marketing – particularly to an existing base of people who have opted in to receive your email newsletter. In a recent post about integrating video into your email marketing campaign I found that there was a significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included in an email campaign. It sounds like a lot of people are missing the boat on this possible distribution channel.
Blogs sourcing most of the 80.88% of all referred traffic in this sample.
To those trying to make a video go viral, this should be telling you to reach out to relevant bloggers who could help you tremendously with the push for video views.
0.63% derives from video search engines
This is bad news to the ever increasing number of online video search sites that seem to keep popping up promising to help your video go viral or supposedly helping you search. With less than a 1% take, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. I’ve long held that most of these sites have very little value to the online video producer – this study just proves my theory.
So the real take-a-way here…
…is engaging bloggers to work with you by sharing the video with them. If nearly 81% of video traffic is coming from blogs it only makes sense to try and engage relevant bloggers to share your video. The other real key that isn’t really discussed is to make sure you optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it can easily be found by those who are searching.
Recent Blog Posts:
How many views make a viral video a success?
How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?
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