Not only do 55% of all keyword searches in the U.S. return at least one video blended into Google’s web search results, but 8 out 10 of those videos belong to YouTube.
That’s according to a new white paper from Searchmetrics, who state that the proportion of YouTube videos in Google’s Universal Search results (the term for all the media snippets that appear in Google results alongside web pages) was 82% at the end of 2014.
That’s up from the 54% that YouTube claimed in 2013, and leaves just an 18% share for other video platforms. The 55% results compares favorably with the 40% of results which includes an image, or a Shopping result (16%), or a News result (13%).
The study confirmed the visibility of video in the Universal search results is down from the 65% recorded by Searchmetrics for 2013, but YouTube still dominates – which isn’t too surprising considering Google is its parent company.
So, what happened? Has the volume of YouTube videos in Universal Search increased, or has the volume of videos from competitors fallen? Searchmetrics state it is due to the decrease in the number of videos from other platforms. The study examined YouTube and its six largest competitors and found that YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion were treading water throughout 2014, while Metacafe, Hulu, Muzu, and Helpster were sinking to the bottom of the ocean:
Click here to track views across all major online video platforms with software from our partner, Tubular Labs.
Now, some internet marketers and video content producers might ask, “If more than 80% of the videos found in Google Universal Search results come from YouTube, about 5% come from Vimeo, and about 5% come from Dailymotion, then what happened to all those videos in other players that webmasters ‘optimized’ for their websites?”
Well, all but a small handful of them must have sunk to the bottom of the ocean (i.e. lower than the first 5 pages of Google Universal Search results). In other words, it appears that I was right when I declared two years ago, “The Video SEO War Is Over … and YouTube Won!” And despite having to eat crow the following year when YouTube’s share dropped, it seems like I’m right again.
Now, other people in the online video and internet marketing industries might ask, “What about Facebook videos? Didn’t Facebook just announce that it had served up 4 billion video views a day in April 2015, up from 3 billion in January, and just 1 billion back in September 2014?”
That’s true. But when was the last time you saw a Facebook video in Google Universal Search results? And you’re probably not going to anytime soon because Facebook doesn’t let Google crawl its pages, which accounts for the lack of visibility.
