14 DAY TRIAL // Online video is big business, maybe not in terms of revenue but it's one of the principal drivers of online traffic. In fact, more and more videos are being created and uploaded everyday much more than anyone could ever hope to see in their lifetime. So, how is one supposed to swift through the countless cat videos to find that one rare gem? Well, surprisingly or not, most people find new videos through blogs.
According to a new study by TubeMogul, an online video syndication service, blogs are one of the main sources people find new videos outweighed only by direct navigation. Over a two-month period, the company tracked the traffic for 35,528,837 videos from six leading video-hosting sites. The study concluded that 45.1 percent of users found a new video through direct navigation i.e. searching directly on the site or through related or featured videos.
Meanwhile, blogs accounted for the vast majority of referrals with 44.2 percent of traffic coming from this source far outweighing traditional sources like search engines and even social media. In fact, search engine traffic only made up 6.1 percent of the overall traffic and social networking sites 2 percent. Social bookmarking sites accounted for 1.75 of the traffic, while email a mere 0.38 percent though this figure may not be entirely accurate. Surprisingly, video search engines only brought in 0.35 percent of the traffic so the future doesn't look too bright for that market.
If we look only at the referrals, discounting direct traffic, a wide variety of blogs made up 81.2 percent of the referrals and no one source stood out. The biggest individual referrer is still Google, as expected, but it only accounts for 7.19 percent of the traffic followed by Yahoo, the second biggest search engine in the world, so no surprise here, with 2.12 percent. Facebook, once again, proves it’s becoming a major source of traffic providing 1.93 percent of the referrals just marginally beaten by Yahoo.
When added up, search engines made up 11.18 percent of the referrals, social networks 3.66 percent, social bookmarking sites 3.19 percent, video search engines 0.63 percent, and email/IM only 0.05 percent. However, numbers for email/IM may not be entirely accurate as the study focused more on traffic coming from inside browsers.