Lack of Standards in Online Video Metrics Hurts the Industry

By many counts, over 300 million online videos are streamed daily. It’s hard to believe that YouTube was only started in January of 2005 given the incredible global consumer demand. While the models for monetization of these video streams really haven’t been figured out yet, the market is generally optimistic.

We at TubeMogul believe that better viewership data will help enable advertising models in this space. Through the development of our cross-site aggregated analytics tool, we have discovered that there is a fundamental problem that must be addressed for the online video industry to thrive financially – the lack of standards around what counts as a “view.”

How an online video site records a view for their online videos varies greatly from site to site. We conducted research to test such differences across eight of the top video sites (results can be seen in this report). While one site may count a view every time the play button is clicked, another might only count finishes. Further complicating the issue is how sites calculate views on embedded videos, page refreshes, and views from the same IP address. Therefore, an advertiser looking to use viewership data to allocate ad inventory or place viral videos has no comparative ability at this point in time. This lack of standardization has stymied business model growth for online video sites, content producers, and advertisers, and will continue to hamstring the industry until standards are in place.

We feel that it is incumbent on the leading video websites to come together to discuss and agree upon measurement standards. TubeMogul is prepared to host an event to get the dialogue started. Please contact me if you are a principal or senior executive at one of the top video sharing sites and are interested in participating in the standards effort – mark@tubemogul.com.

5 comments June 27th, 2007