Which Role do Video Rankings Play in News Boxes?
25. May 2023One of the many different news ranking types on Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is the video ranking. A video ranking can stand alone, be in a News Box or in a News Carousel. Furthermore, there is an extra carousel element only for video rankings, in which mainly YouTube is placed, whereas YouTube does not play a role in the News Box. In addition to that, video rankings can also appear in a Publisher Carousel. That is a news carousel, where only one publisher appears with several articles on one topic. Through the Publisher Carousel, Google shows the authority of a publisher on a certain topic.
Data
The basis for this analysis is the data from the Mobile and Desktop News Boxes. With this data, we examined how many News Box rankings there were in total in the year 2022, which were a lot: in total 81,271,853. Therefore we took a closer look and asked ourselves how big the difference between the News-Box-rankings with a video ranking on the mobile and on the desktop SERP would be and when there were the fewest as well as the most video rankings in the News Box.
News Box with video rankings
The play button indicates a video ranking.
Google has displayed articles that contain a video as video ranking on the SERP until April 13, 2023. Since then, only articles whose main content is a video is given a video ranking. For some articles, a video is useful if it illustrates the news situation better because, for example, a politician’s speech is shown in the video. A video can also increase the engagement with the user.
Findings from 2022
Progress of News Boxes on Desktop and mobile SERP with Video Rankings in 2022.
In total, there were over 120 million News Boxes (120,525,067) on the mobile and nearly 190 million News Boxes (188,375,195) on the desktop SERP in 2022. Of these Desktop News Box rankings, 15.4 percent were video rankings. On the mobile SERP, an average of 11,6 percent had a video ranking. In February, the proportion of video rankings then fell to its lowest point at 10.5 percent, with the number of News Boxes also dropping rapidly to just 8,969,293. On the desktop SERP, the lowest point was in March. Only 14.9 percent of more than 16 million News Box rankings were video rankings at that time. December saw the highest number on the desktop and on the mobile SERPs: 12.7 percent video rankings while there were 9,074,419 News Boxes on the mobile SERP. On the desktop SERP were 16.2 percent with a video ranking and also the lowest number of News Boxes on the Desktop SERP: 13,849,465 News Boxes in total.
Conclusion
Looking at the data from 2022, our findings are:
☞ The share of video rankings in News Boxes is not as big as articles without video in the News Boxes, because of all News Box rankings, around 15 percent on desktop and around 11 percent on mobile SERPs are a video ranking.
☞ The share of video rankings in the News Boxes is relatively stable and changes only slightly over time.
☞ The share of video rankings in the News Boxes differs between mobile and desktop SERP by around three percent.
☞ A video ranking can be very attractive for a user and keep the person on your site for a long time, which is good for the time-on-site/session duration. But not all rankings in a News Box are video rankings and this is probably preferred by a certain target group.
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