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VideoJug: video search and 'how to' queries
February 21, 2008
With the ongoing popularity of video sharing websites like YouTube and information sharing websites such as Wikipedia, it was only a matter of time before the two were combined. The latest phenomenon gaining interest online is ‘videopedia’, a range of ‘how to’ videos covering subjects from cooking your favourite meals and undressing a woman with your teeth, to more everyday tips such as applying blusher or hanging a picture.
The last year has seen a massive rise in visits to one of these sites in particular: VideoJug.com, which saw is market share of visits triple between January 2007 and 2008. Last week the site ranked at number 33 in our Multimedia category, which includes video giants such as Youtube, MySpace TV and Blinkx. The following chart shows visits to the VideoJug website on the left axis and visits to the site from our search engines category on the right axis. This nicely illustrates the importance of search traffic to the website, with the two lines tracking each other almost exactly.
Since search is such an important source of traffic for VideoJug, we ran some analysis on the top 200 search terms that sent traffic to the site over the 12 weeks ending 9th February 08. It is interesting to note that 102 of the 200 terms were cooking and recipe related searches, including ‘beef wellington’, ‘how to make pancakes’ and ‘egg fried rice’. The clickstream report for VideoJug shows that the site shares a lot of its traffic with popular food websites such as BBC Food and Delia Online. The Food & Beverage category is the third largest driver of traffic to VideoJug, which indicates that people searching for recipes visit a number of the sites that appear within the listings for a query. For example, a search for ‘how to make pancakes’ generates listings for BBC Food and Delia Online as well as VideoJug, and a searcher may look at all three references to decide the best recipe to go with.
The rest of VideoJug’s search terms were split pretty evenly across topics concerning caring for pets, applying makeup, sexual relationships, clothing, and health - plus some miscellaneous queries regarding juggling and making Christmas wreaths.
Just under a quarter of the top 200 VideoJug search terms were ‘how to’ queries. In general, ‘how to’ queries fluctuate over the year, peaking during December in 2007. However, the breadth of terms (i.e. the number of different ‘how to queries’ typed into search engines) has increased overall by 12% since the 8th September, with Hitwise recording just under 563,000 unique searches containing the term ‘how to’ over the 12 weeks ending 9th February.
There are a number of ‘how to’ websites out there offering different ‘helpful’ models. As the name suggests, Wikihow utilizes the Wikipedia approach, relying on visitors to modify the content themselves. Ehow’s model is a combination of user generated and professionally produced content, offering text instructions and video. VideoJug sits somewhere in the middle: the majority of its content is managed by the website owners, with a small section for videos ‘Made by you’. These websites are increasingly sharing traffic with one another. During the week ending 16th February Wikihow was the number eight upstream website to Ehow and the number three downstream site, while Videojug was the number eleven upstream website.
As the ‘how to’ industry grows, the method of delivering the information and level of user interaction will dictate which sites will dominate in the future. However, as the chart above illustrates, VideoJug is currently pulling ahead of the competition.
Posted by Robin Goad at 01:50 PM
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Comments
Inspired by some research into how consumers are searching during the economic downturn, we just posted some data on the most popular 'how to' searches. amaxingly, there were almost 170,000 different 'how to' terms typed into a search engine during June.
Analysis here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/07/how_to_save_money_in_a_recessi.html
Posted by Robin Goad | July 9, 2008 04:36 PM
Video combined with some other component is definitely the next frontier in the social marketing arena. All of the majors have significant video efforts on the way.
Posted by Business Loans | February 23, 2008 04:40 AM