According to the video deployment and video search marketing tracking firm TubeMogul, video search engines, like Google’s video search and the search option that appears the YouTube homepage (and nearly every other YouTube page), are not the primary way that people discover videos online.
So how are people finding video online? Through video search marketing blogs and social networks. If you’ve spent time online recently, you probably know how this works. You may have watched an embedded video on one of your favorite blogs. Or maybe a friend on Facebook sent you a video link, knowing you’d appreciate it. This is called direct navigation, since clicking on a link to go to a site like YouTube, the user is navigating to that specific video. And according to video search marketing researchers TubeMogul, that’s how 45% of all videos on YouTube are found. But once they’re on a site like YouTube, viewers will often stay and watch one or more related videos.
In their conclusion, TubeMogul reports that it may be most beneficial for video search marketing advertisers to find bloggers and people on social networks by optimizing tags and other metadata on their videos.
