Google And Facebook Continue To Lead Referral Traffic For Videos On Media Sites

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Thursday, February 17th, 2011


In the third quarter of 2010, BrightCove and Tube Mogul’s Online Video & The Media Industry report showed that Facebook passed Yahoo to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites). Facebook has continued its reign as the second largest referrer of traffic, behind Google, in the fourth quarter of 2010 according to a new report from the video platform companies.

Facebook exhibited the healthiest growth rates in terms of referral traffic, now accounting for 11.8% of all referred video traffic to media companies. The report says that the social network’s growth is mainly attributed to Facebook’s increasing support for white-listed embedded video that plays in-stream, allowing for contextual viewing without requiring any redirect of traffic. Google accounts for 60% of traffic whereas Twitter only accounts for around 2% of traffic. Clearly, search drives views.

In terms of growth rate, Yahoo and Twitter both showed dwindling growth rates. Facebook is growing the fastest in terms of referral traffic followed by Bing and Google.

However, Facebook and Twitter elicited higher engagement rates than Google measured by minutes viewed. The report showed that brands (as opposed to magazines, newspapers, broadcasters, and online media) have higher engagement rates across all referring sources, including Google and Facebook, than other content, which could suggest both video discovered with SEO and through social sharing are resulting in increased engagement for brand viewers. Brands saw highest video engagement when referred by Yahoo, reaching 2:30 minutes viewed on average, which may point to the success of syndication efforts of such content.

Company: Brightcove
Website: brightcove.com
Launch Date: 2004
IPO: NASDAQ:BCOV

Brightcove Inc. (NASDAQ: BCOV), a leading global provider of cloud content services, offers a family of products used to publish and distribute the world’s professional digital media. The company’s products include Video Cloud, the market-leading online video platform, App Cloud, a pioneering content app platform, and Zencoder, a leading cloud-based media processing service and HTML5 video player technology provider. Brightcove has more than 6,100 customers in over 60 countries that rely on Brightcove cloud content services to build and...

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Company: TubeMogul
Website: tubemogul.com
Launch Date: November 2006
Funding: $37M

TubeMogul is the only video marketing company built for branding. By integrating real-time media buying, ad serving, targeting, optimization and brand measurement into its PlayTime platform, TubeMogul simplifies the delivery of video ads and maximizes the impact of every dollar spent by brand marketers. The company only partners with premium and transparent inventory sources, including direct publishers and private networks, to deliver video to any audience, in any format, on any device. Advertisers only pay when someone chooses...

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