Facebook Refers More Video Views than Twitter

Brightcove is an online video platform geared towards major media companies with “more than 1,800 customers in 48 countries, which operate video across nearly 10,00 websites.” Tubemogul is an “online video analytics and advertising platform that processes billions of video streams every month” from over 200,000 users.

In 2008, Brightcove licensed Tubemogul’s InPlay technology to provide its customer base with a robust analytics tool. Now the two companies are collaborating to release quarterly online video research reports.

In Online Video & the Media Industry, Brightcove and Tubemogul looked at data from a cross-section of Brightcove’s customer base from the previous two quarters. They came away with some interesting findings.

Newspapers and Magazines are Pushing a lot of Online Video
The BP oil spill had at least two unintentional beneficiaries: YouTube’s ad network and the online video departments at newspaper websites. In Q2 2010, online video streams from newspapers’ online destinations grew by more than 65 percent.

In the past quarter, newspapers and magazines have also generated a respective 2.3 billion and 1.3 billion video player loads, up over 38% from Q2 2009.

In the View Battle of On-Site vs. Embeds, On-Site Wins
Whether it’s due to a restrictive embed culture from some major media publishers, the “premium long-form nature of their content,” or a sign that big portals are winning the online video traffic game, only 1.9% of major broadcasters’ video views occurred via embeds. Newspapers had the highest number of views via embeds at 13.6%. Magazines, music videos, radio, and pure play online media properties came somewhere in between the two.

Viewers also tend to spend less time watching embeds, with the exception of video coming from pure play online media properties. Your average view time for videos from online media properties is 1:32 on-site, and 1:45 if it’s embedded. Views on major broadcasters’ destinations clock in at 3 minutes on-site, and only 1:59 off.

Facebook Refers More Video Views than Twitter
Which makes sense given Facebook has 500 million active users to Twitter’s 190+ million. Google’s still bigger than both of them, accounting for 64% of third party traffic, followed by Yahoo at 11.9%, Facebook at 4.3%, Bing at 2.6%, and Twitter at 1.2%.

All of those referrers, however, account for less than 20% of all video streams. 81.9% of video streams “were discovered via direct traffic or navigation within a publisher’s own site.”

Download the PDF of the full report here.

Generic picture of attractive lady with glasses looking at newspaper in front of a graph by Statsheet.com.