They Like to Watch: Twitter Users Keep Watching Video Long After Facebook and Digg Fans Bail Out
by Peter Kafka
Posted on July 14, 2009 at 1:01 PM PT
Want to get people to stick around and actually watch your dog-on-skateboard video? Try luring them with Twitter.
So says video-tracking service TubeMogul, which reports that Twitter users who click on a referral link to a Web video are likely to stay longer than people who get to the video from Facebook or Digg. Tubemogul has a handy chart to make its case here:
Tubemogul thinks this is surprising data, but the results make perfect sense to me. Digg users race in and out of Web pages with amazing speed, and the bigger Facebook gets, the less meaningful your “friends” list becomes, which means you’re more likely to be steered to something you really don’t care about.
But since you’re self-selecting the people you pay attention to on Twitter, their referrals should be more meaningful. This is where the Twitterati’s praise of the “passed link” as a new currency has some real meaning.
Tubemogul’s data come from a three-month survey of video links from the three services, totaling more than 6.7 billion video views. TubeMogul notes that it can’t say which services it tracks, but simple math makes it an awfully good bet that one of them is Google’s (GOOG) YouTube.
All-righty. Time to put Tubemogul’s data to the test. I just asked my Twitter pals to send me the best YouTube clip they’ve seen all day, and these are the first three responses I got (thanks @smalera, @laceyhaines and @derekbrookmeyer). See if they hold your attention (Warning! One of these is a clip of Kubrick’s adaptation of a Nabokov novel, and no one falls down, gets hit in the head or explodes at any point. Just so you know.)
