Lack of Standards in Online Video Metrics Hurts the Industry
June 27th, 2007
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.
Sphere: Related ContentEntry Filed under: New Media/Old Media, TubeMogul News, TubeMogul Research, Video Advertising, Video Analytics, Video Viewership
5 Comments Add your own
1. Jason | July 5th, 2007 at 10:05 am
I don’t think you report is quite accurate. I have a youtube videos (called “FEVER: The Musical”) that I accidentally have an extra minute of basically nothing at the end of the video.
I doubt that my friends (or anybody) waiting for a minute of nothing to go by for Youtube to count it as a view. Yet, I still have 800 views after only two months.
Thoughts?
2. admin | July 5th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Good question - perhaps there is another trip point (beyond >1/2 way through the video, say >3/4 through) where the video counts as a view. Or, perhaps YouTube didn’t count my tests because it recognized my IP address. We didn’t test other trip points or test from multiple computers.
In either case, our main point still holds. Video sharing sites differ in how they count a view, and that’s bad for the industry because it makes it harder for advertisers to measure ROI. Standards can fix this problem.
3. Jason | July 6th, 2007 at 5:22 am
True. Thank you for your website!
4. Hugh | July 28th, 2007 at 5:01 am
My own YouTube testing shows that if a video is fully streamed (i.e. downloaded) it counts as a view regardless of whether you actually watch the whole thing or not.
With a decent connection, a video streams much faster than viewed. You can see in YouTube the download progress of any video being watched (the red bar that fills ahead of the current play location of the status bar).
So jason you’re really cool FEVER video fully streamed for me at 4:44 into the video play, adding another YouTube view.
5. J | August 10th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I think YouTube counts anything over 35 seconds a play.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed