The other day I posted about what marketing agencies see as a measure of viral video success. Unbelievably over a quarter peg the success rate at a million views or more, which to me seems like a case of taking the big number and plucking it out of thin air.

Why? Because getting up to 50k is an achievement given the thousands of brand films that languish on YouTube with several hundred views.

As new research from TubeMogul shows, even though video sharing sites host the actual films, less than half (45%) of us now discover content by browsing through these sites. Which could be why ‘featured’ clips on YouTube used to get 500,000 views, but now often don’t reach 100,000.

Where does the other 55% come from?

Search engines: 11.18%,
Social networks: 3.66%,
Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%,
Video search engines: 0.63%,
Email/IM: 0.05%

“Everything else (almost all blogs, from the thousands we scanned): 80.88% of all referred traffic.”

In other words, forget about seeding your video on specialist video search engines, or hoping people will forward it on by email. Blogs and online media are the key to success. Or, according to TubeMogul:

”These results likely come as bad news to the myriad sites that are set up with online video discovery in mind, such as video search engines, which source a relatively modest 0.63% of all referred video views.

”To those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, perhaps this gives some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.”

Image – Kimba