The latest quarter research report from Brightcove and TubeMogul shows that brands saw a “massive” jump in engagement in the fourth quarter of 2010 from the previous quarter, suggesting that “brands are improving the quality of their content and connecting with receptive audiences.”
In the fourth quarter, brands went from averaging 1:03 minutes per viewer to 2:03 minutes per viewer. While broadcasters continue to lead the way in average minutes watched per viewer, newspapers and online media showed strong growth through 2010 as well. Magazines, however, saw stagnant engagement with viewers throughout 2010.
“Along with minutes viewed, completion rates are also trending upward across the board. Completion rate refers to videos that were watched from start to finish,” according to the report. “This is the first time we’ve seen any category surpass a 50% completion rate, which online media and broadcasters both achieved this quarter.”
Online media and broadcasters finished the year with the strongest drop-off rates. The report notes that in the fourth quarter, “brands started strong and dropped off at a steeper pitch than other categories between 75% and completion of the full video. This could either suggest that branded content is potentially too long, or is watched in a highly-distracted browsing mode.”
In the fourth quarter of 2010, Facebook surpassed Yahoo as the No. 2 referral source, second only to Google, when it came to driving traffic to online video content for media companies and brands. While Google still blows the competition out of the water with more than 60 percent of referred traffic, Facebook now refers 11.8 percent of all video traffic to media companies.
Facebook also showed the healthiest average monthly growth in referral traffic in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, followed by Bing and Google. Twitter saw a slight decline, while Yahoo saw a rather large decline in excess of 6 percent.
“Overall, Facebook and Twitter elicited higher engagement rates on aggregate as referring sites measured by minutes viewed,” the report noted. “Interestingly, brands exhibited significantly higher engagement rates across all referring sources than other content, which seems to suggest that both video discovered with SEO and through social sharing are resulting in increased engagement for brand viewers.”
According to comScore, more than 171 million unique viewers in the U.S. watched online video content in January for an average of 14.5 hours per viewer.
Google Sites led the way with 144 million viewers, followed by VEVO with 51.0 million, Yahoo Sites with 48.7 million, Viacom Digital with 48.1 million, AOL with 44.5 million, Facebook with 42.1 million, Microsoft Sites with 38.1 million, Turner Digital with 28.2 million, Fox Interactive Media with 25.4 million and Hulu with 25.0 million.
The top online video property by video ads viewed in the U.S. was Hulu with 1.1 billion video ad impressions in January. Tremor Media Video Network followed with nearly 504 million ad impressions, while ADAP.TV was third with nearly 432 million impressions.
The duration of the average piece of online video content was five minutes in January, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes long, according to comScore.
Sources:</strong
Network
