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Heather Dougherty over at the Hitwise Intelligence blog had a very insightful post recently discussing how Search has caught up to Social Networks and Forums in providing upstream referrals to video sites. Below is a summary o Heather’s post:
- 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%.
- So who accounts for the majority of traffic sent to video websites? MySpace, Google, and Yahoo! – each of which own & operate video properties. The share of traffic referred by Google (up 44%) and Yahoo! (up 13%) to the video category increased for the week ending April 12, 2008 when compared to the same week last year. While MySpace accounted for the largest share of referred traffic, there was a 25% decline when compared to the same week during the previous year.
- Universal and blended search are providing more prominent video results and may be one of the reasons for the growth in search-referred traffic.
- Another driver for this change in referral behavior may be the shifting demographics as video websites attract a more mainstream audience. The traffic to YouTube demonstrates a good example – for the 4 weeks ending April 14, 2007, 30% of their traffic was aged 18-24. This has declined to 21% for the 4 weeks ending April 12, 2008, with the share of traffic being more evenly represented across all age groups. While social networks are no longer only the playground of the young, the majority of the audience (47%) is under the age of 35.
