Research from video deployment and tracking firm TubeMogul suggests search engines, blogs and social networks refer more users to online videos than video search engines do.
The study covered inbound URLs across 35,528,837 video streams from six major video sites over two months.
"These results likely come as bad news to the myriad sites that are set up with online video discovery in mind, such as video search engines, which source a relatively modest 0.63% of all referred video views," TubeMogul wrote.
The most common way in which viewers arrive at a video site is via direct navigation, with 45.13% of all video views occurring directly at sites like YouTube. From there they typically run additional video searches or click through featured or related videos.
Referring sites are a broader mix: no single source came out on top, but a longtail of blogs provided about 80% of referred traffic.
In toto, search engines provided 11.18% of all video referrals; social networks provided 3.66%. Following close behind were social bookmarking aggregation sites, with 3.19; then video search engines (0.63%) and email/IM sites (0.05%).
"I thought Google and the video hosting sites were going to make up a much larger share […] I was really surprised to find that the long tail is so long," stated TubeMogul Marketing Manager David Burch, who authored the report.
Google led among the top 20 individual referrers, however, with 7.19%. At second was Yahoo with 2.12% of referrals, followed by Facebook at 1.93% and MySpace with 1.55%.
Meanwhile, social bookmarking and aggregation sites like Digg and Stumbleupon sent over 1.49% and 1.13%, respectively. Those that provided less than 1% of referrals to video sites included MSN/Live, Blogspot, AOL, Reddit, Truveo, Flurl, blinkx and Ask.
As a result of its findings, TubeMogul advised that video-based advertisers reach out to bloggers and optimize the metadata on a video to ensure it ranks well on video-hosting sites.
Recent reports found YouTube fuels 13% of growth in US online video viewing; and that online video would become the primary focus of marketing campaigns in 2009.
