VideoVoo: Online Video Marketing

While most of the traffic to various online videos came via social networking sites in 2007 April, one year later, we see that search engines (and video search engines) came a long distance and scored a draw, according to the data presented by Hitwise, and I am positive that search will increase further.

Heather Dougherty writes

search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic. Last week (ending April 12, 2008) the share of upstream traffic from search increased 35% over the same week the previous year, while the referred traffic from social networks declined 20%.

Heather suggests that this gradual process of equalization comes from the following trends:

1. Universal and blended search, which mixes text snippets from website headline or description meta tags or other texts extracted from the given website and videos, maps, images, news results, etc. These mixed search results show videos more prominently than ever before, so it boosts the growth in search-referred traffic: Google (up 44%) and Yahoo! (up 13%)
2. On the contrary, social networking site MySpace, which caters for most of the video referrals with 22.54% compared to Google 19.04% and Yahoo approx. 13%, showed a 25% decline from 2007 to 2008.
3. Shifting demographics: “video websites attract a more mainstream audience,” writes Heather Dougherty from Hitwise. YouTube for one thing is visited by a wider range of generations - more evenly represented across all age groups. In contrast, in social networking “the majority of the audience (47%) is under the age of 35″ So basically, I guess, what Heather is suggesting is that younger users may reach videos (still) more via social networking sites but as older users get the taste for online videos and use general search rather than social media, referrals are more from search than social sites.

Now, I am a bit puzzled and I wonder how the data was aggregated. While Google Video is definitely a video search engine also hosting its own videos, YouTube is a vid social networking platform hosting videos plus related conversations, and making them searchable - presumably using Google internal video search engine. However, I think when it comes to searching videos, YouTube is also thought of as a vertical video search engine. So it seems a blurry area to phrase things clearly for search vs. social networking and video search vs. video social networking. For the French, Daily Motion is The Video site, especially for French video uploads, and it’s a social networking site at the same time. MySpace is hosting its own MySpace videos on vids.myspace.com, and its internal video search is run by Google.

So what was the baseline for measuring video sites and the traffic sent to them via various referrals?

Anyway, let’s suppose it was a clear-cut question and I am only confused because I have the time to be confused (aka hairsplitting). Let’s see how we can find videos online at all. Some of the major ones:

• videos found via search (blended search, excluding internal site search on any social networking site, even if the sole aim of the visit to the ’social networking site’ hosting zillions of videos to qualify the ’social networking site’ as a ‘video search engine’, was nothing else but searching for a video)
• videos via emails (closer to social media than search, so Yahoo Mail with its about 4% is minus from Yahoo’s 13%)
• videos on user profiles: e.g. MySpace profiles, but there are profiles on video social networking sites too serving as internal references…
• videos on news websites, blogposts, vlogs, twits, articles, company websites, forums etc. - anything that is not search neither social networking sites (for me wordpress or blogger is not a social networking site referral)

How do you group video referrals? Let’s take an example:

My Space referring to a MySpace vid, My Space referring to a YouTube vid, MySpace referring to a Google video, YouTube referring to a YouTube vid, Google Video referring to a YouTube vid, Google Video search referring to a Google vid, Google Search (not video search, ‘normal’ blended search) referring to a Google vid, Google Video Search referring to an AOL featured video, etc. etc.

My instinct, or rather self-observation tells me, although how major a factor it is among users I don’t know, that users tend to re-visit certain videos, which are a lot easier to find via a good video search engine than trying to search the email or the profile of that person. To boot, clickable interactive hypervideos are going to make criss cross linking and referral typology even more challenging in a couple of years.

Also, the intention could be a better basis of comparison than the type of site, but obviously it’s way too difficult to measure video consumption intentions.

photo from Hitwise