Online video viewing trends show TV broadcasters and social networks becoming more popular as avenues for this type of media, according to a new white paper from Brightcove and TubeMogul.
TV Broadcasters Achieve Highest Growth in Online Video Minutes
Findings from “Online Video & The Media Industry” indicate that between the first quarter and second quarter of 2010, average online video minutes watched held fairly steady across most categories. However, growth was achieved by television broadcasters by 3.1% to 3:01 minutes and magazines by 2.1% to 1:21 minutes.
Radio saw the biggest decline, dropping 14.4% from 1:32 minutes to 1:13 minutes in Q2 2010. Online media followed closely behind, dropping 14.3% from 1:54 minutes to 1:32 minutes.
Newspaper Completion Rates Sharply Drop
Completion rates, which refer to videos that were watched from start to finish, were also steady across most of the media verticals, though broadcasters, newspapers and radio saw a decline from Q1 2010 to Q2 2010. Newspapers saw the sharpest decrease, dropping from 41% in Q1 2010 to 33% in Q2 2010, or 19.5%.
Google Dominates 3rd Party Referrals
Overall, 81.9% of video streams were discovered via direct traffic or navigation within a publisher’s own site. In the case of third party referral traffic, 64% comes from Google, followed by Yahoo (11.9%), Facebook (4.3%), Bing (2.6%), and Twitter (1.2%).
SocNets Lead 3rd Party Referral Growth
In terms of number of video streams referred per month, Facebook and Twitter are growing much faster than traditional search engines as sources of video views. At current rates, Facebook will surpass Yahoo within the year to be second only to Google in referral traffic to online video content for media companies.
Broadcasters Have Hardly any Off-site Embeds
Broadcasters had the lowest percentage of off-site embeds (1.9%), which Brightcove says is not surprising given the premium, longform nature of their content.
Newspapers, on the other hand, had the highest percentage of off-site embeds, with 13.6% of all video content being embedded on third-party sites. Music videos represent the second-highest percentage, followed by radio broadcasters, magazine publishers and pure-play Web media properties.
Off-site Embeds Mostly Watched for Shorter Time
Viewers watching videos via off-site embeds tended to watch less minutes per stream than on-site viewers. Videos were watched for nearly double the amount of time on broadcast sites (3:00 minutes) as they were from off-site embeds (1:59 minutes), but the numbers were less dramatic across the other verticals.
Brightcove notes that while pure-play web media properties had the second lowest percentage of offsite embeds, viewers watched off-site videos nearly 15 seconds longer than onsite video content for this media vertical.
Facebook Gets 45.6M Online Video Viewers
Ranking the top online video sites by unique viewer, comScore determined Facebook.com jumped from fourth place in June 2010 to third place in July 2010 with 46.57 million unique viewers. Facebook narrowly beat Microsoft Sites, which had 45.56 million unique viewers for the month. Vevo, which was ranked third place in viewership in June 2010, dropped to fifth place with 43.91 million unique viewers.
Meanwhile, Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, once again ranked as the top online video content property with 143.2 million unique viewers, followed by Yahoo Sites with 55.1 million viewers.
About the Data: The data used for the analysis included in this report was taken from a cross-section sample of Brightcove customers representing media industry verticals. While the sample aggregates a sizable data set, it is not intended to be statistically representative of the online video industry as a whole, or of Brightcove’s entire customer base.