Hitwise: Video served nearly equally from search engines, social networks

With more marketers taking a deeper look at online video, it bears further scrutiny. According to recent reports from both Hitwise and comScore, online video hit a new high in March with more than 10 billion videos served to consumers. The comScore report indicated a 66% increase in video viewing year over year.

by Kristina Knight

According to Hitwise, visits to video site YouTube increase just over 30% year over year.

What is most interesting, however, is another report from Hitwise which indicates that social platforms aren't reaping all of the rewards for video. According to the report, in April 2007, search engines were responsible for just over 20% of videos served while social networks were responsible for more than 35%.

However, by April of 2008, those percentages were nearly equal. The report finds that search engines are now responsible for about 28.4% of upstream traffic to video sites while social networks are responsible for 28.8% of the traffic.

This is very interesting because most advertisers assume that social networks are how consumers find their videos. This report indicates that the video marketplace is continuing to gain popularity and that consumers aren't only looking to favorite social networks like MySpace or YouTube to find television or movie clips and user generated content.