The Online Video & Media Industry report by BrightCove and Tube Mogul which was released in the third economic quarter of 2010 has shown that Facebook has now overtaken Yahoo to become the second largest traffic source to media sites for referring online videos. Videos across the BrightCove network have been tracked by the study which focuses mainly on magazine, newspaper, brand, broadcaster and online media sites. A new report released by various video platform companies also states that Facebook continues to be the second largest source of such traffic, following the heels of Google, in 2010’s fourth quarter.
Facebook has shown the fastest and steadiest growth rate for referral traffic, and now accounts for 11.8% of all the video referrals made to media companies. According to the reports, Facebook’s growth can be credited to the increasing support it is providing to white-listed embedded video that can be played on the site itself, which allows these videos to be viewed contextually without requiring the viewers to be redirected. 60% of the traffic to media websites is still provided by Google and a paltry 2% by the micro blogging site Twitter. This is understandable, as most of the views are driven by search.
The growth rates of both Yahoo and Twitter are dwindling at best. Facebook, however, shows the highest growth and is closely followed by Google and Bing. Google was also beaten by the popular social networks Facebook and Twitter in their engagement rates which was measured by the minutes viewed. The reports said that much higher engagement rates were seen in case of brands across all kinds of referring sources as compared to other content. The highest engagement in videos in cases of brands was seen when it was referred to by Yahoo, with the average viewer watching 2:30 minutes.
