New Online Video Research

Brightcove & TubeMogul recently released their quarterly research report for Q1 and Q2 of 2011, entitled Online Video & The Media Industry – Special Features: Full Length Episodes, Mobile Engagement. The report focuses on three areas: platform usage, online video engagement and discovery, and mobile engagement. Today we’re going to look at their findings on engagement and discovery for online video across brands, broadcasters, newspapers, online media, and magazines.

Video Discovery – Search Up, Facebook Down

The report devotes a lot of time to how videos are being discovered and where the online video traffic is coming from, whether through search, social media properties like Twitter, and so on.

The good news for those of you who still care about Video SEO: video discovery by search is up, with Google seeing a 3.7% increase in referral traffic quarter to quarter.

Facebook, on the other hand, had its first quarter of actually decreasing in referral traffic:

It’s interesting that Facebook referrals dropped a bit in the second quarter, but not enough information to draw sweeping conclusions. Does this mean Facebook is no longer a good place to market your videos? Of course it doesn’t mean that. But it could be the beginning of a trend, and definitely something to keep an eye on.

In the meantime, search remains the single biggest way to connect prospective viewers with your videos, as has almost always been the case. Despite the rise (and impressive performance) of social video and other innovative video marketing strategies, search is still the key. And I bet a great many video marketers have started skipping some of the old classic Video SEO steps.