Why Facebook Is Approaching Google Scale In Video Referrals

Facebook is poised to overtake Yahoo! for video referral traffic a new study suggests. The report from Brightcove and TubeMogul, covered in WebProNews, says Facebook is set to reach this milestone within the year, becoming the second biggest site for video referral traffic behind Google.

As well as higher traffic, Facebook and also Twitter are delivering higher levels of engagement for video on television network and music entertainment websites. Consumers who find marketing and e-commerce video via Facebook have the longest viewing times at 1 hour, 24 minutes, according to the report. Twitter is close behind with 1 hour, 18 minutes, while traffic originating from Yahoo! search or display ads average only 52 minutes apiece.

This highlights the importance of social recommendations on the web. Searching for video on Google or Yahoo! can help me find a lot of video on a certain topic but it doesn’t tell me much about the quality of the video. While it’s true that search engine algorithms take into account organic links – and this is a measure of quality of a sort – recommendations from my friends are more compelling to me than links from strangers.

Another factor is that online video viewing is increasing as internet speeds improve and broadband services become more widespread. The study suggests that online video viewing grew across all media categories in the second quarter with unique viewers increasing on average 2.8% per month, and consumers watched 11% more videos-month-over-month compared to the first quarter.

Facebook would be benefiting from this organic growth, combined with the fact that the social networking site is also growing steadily. Meanwhile Yahoo! has been steadily losing market share as a search engine and portal over the past decade, so it’s not surprising that it could soon lose out to Facebook in terms of video referrals.