Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics

Without detailed information on who’s watching—not to mention where, when, for how long, and on what devices—it’s impossible to prove the business value of your video communications initiative. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach.  At the Online Video Platform Summit, this all-star panel that examines what is the important data you should be collecting and how to use that data to improve the effectiveness of your video and increase your ROI.

Paul Riismandel, session moderator, started the discussion by asking the panel, "What is the data that is most important for online video publishers? What drives ROI?"

Dan Piech of comScore, says that the most important metrics are the ones that differentiate you. What can you provide that is different from your competitors? You might have a different service, then prove it. What makes your viewers different from other viewers? Are they more engaged, in one thing more than another? That's where data helps show you those differentiation points.

According to Dan Berra of Unicast, engagement is primary metric they focus on in the advertising space. They are tracking how much are people interacting and spending time within that video environment to prove ROI to advertisers. AJ McGowen of Unicorn Media adds that the most important metrics are actionable, and helps you make good business decisions. It's not just about quality of service and did the video have a fast start of buffer, it's about the quality of the content and did people find it engaging – and for publishers it's about how to make the content better.

For Bismarck Lepe of Ooyala,  it really depends on the business case you're trying to solve to define how you measure success. Brett Wilson of TubeMogul says that in general, publishers that sell ads should care about the metrics that their advertisers care about, which is reach, audience and performance. Brand marketers aren't as interested in the real-time metrics as much as they are interested attitudinal metrics – what's the brand lift, what's the purchase intent, or recall? – and the industry could do a better job at creating standard metrics they understand.

The panel all agree that while the industry has similar measures for engagement and reach, it still needs to come together and agree on true key measures of success, even down to what is counted as a view. Data has to be meaningful for publishers to deliver the best possible viewing experience, and at the end of the day it's about a creating that personal experience with great content. It's the social nature of online video that makes it uniquely powerful.

Watch the video below for more of the discussion and to hear where we are going with video analytics, and how publishers can better track their metrics across the different screens.

Speaker bios:

Paul Riismandel, Director of Curriculum Support, School of Communication, Northwestern University (Moderator)

Paul Riismandel has been working in online educational media for fifteen years, specializing in audio and video production designed for streaming. Paul is active in the educational media community as an advocate for online video and encouraging greater collaboration between the education vertical and the larger industry. He writes about these issues in the Class Act column for Streaming Media magazine. Paul is also a radio enthusiast, serving as advisor to student-run WNUR-FM at Northwestern University, and blogging about the future of radio at RadioSurvivor.com. He also blogs and podcasts about other media stuff at mediageek.net.

Brett Wilson, Co-Founder, CEO, TubeMogul

Brett leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first three years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable e-commerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired. Brett is undefeated at Risk, is the reigning Foosball champion at TubeMogul and a lousy (but aspiring) windsurfer, sailor and investor. He is also married and has two beautiful children. Brett received his MBA from the UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Bismarck C Lepe, Co-founder and President of Products, Ooyala

As an Ooyala co-founder and founding CEO, Bismarck Lepe raised $10 million in funding and signed many of the company's early media partnerships before passing the baton to Jay Fulcher in 2009. Currently, as President of Product Strategy, he is responsible for marketing and driving Ooyala's product development vision. Bismarck sits on the Ooyala Board of Directors. Before co-founding Ooyala, Bismarck worked at Google as a Senior Product Manager, developing and managing new products for the company's AdSense network. He launched more than 25 different Google AdSense products, including Click-to-Play video ads and Google's Intelligent Ad Server, which brought the company over $1 billion dollars in new annual revenue. Most notably, Bismarck managed the early growth of AdSense display and video advertising. Business Week named Bismarck one of its Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. Bismarck has a B.A. in Economics and a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University.

AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media

AJ McGowan is responsible for engineering the cutting-edge architecture that will deliver high-quality audio and video via a highly intuitive interface. Prior to Unicorn Media, AJ spent five years at Limelight Networks where as director of solutions engineering, he assisted the company's marquee customers with implementing their content delivery networks, developing best practices, and capacity planning. With a remarkable combination of intelligence and drive, AJ started his first company building high-end custom computers while still in the 8th grade. By age 14, he was an IT manager, and in between high school classes completed a highly technical token ring/mainframe to Ethernet/NT-Unix network upgrade and answered pages from distressed employees.

Dan Berra, Vice President of Business Intelligence, Unicast

Dan Berra leads Unicast’s Business Intelligence division focused on providing robust research, reporting and in-depth analysis of all Unicast-generated advertising campaigns. Under his leadership, clients gain greater insight into campaign results and the effectiveness of rich media and web video against other forms of online advertising As a respected industry veteran, Berra brings more than 12 years of experience spanning financial and marketing analysis at Dell Corporation and T3 (The Think Tank). Most recently, Berra served as the Vice President of the Customer Insight Group at T3, where he built media and search analytics teams from the ground up and created data integration process and databases tying together ad server data, web analytics and client-side data into one interface. Previous to T3 Berra served as transactional marketing manager, at Dell Corp, where he headed the development of segment-level online metrics, created forecasting models and managed transactional marketing. His expertise is in  media and web analytics and measurement,  rich media and online video, next generation web, online media planning and buying, ROI, online advertising and Third Party ad serving.

Dan Piech, Senior Product Management Analyst, comScore Inc.

Dan is a Senior Product Management Analyst at comScore, Inc. and President at Piech Productions. Previously, he was anInteractive Strategy Intern at McKinney, Project Manager at HG Media, Inc and Advertising Intern at Success Communications Group. comScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses.

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all t>ypes, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with
Streaming Media West in Los Angeles, the Online Video Platform Summit is designed for video publishers of all types and sizes, whether small businesses looking to publish content for the first time, independent entertainment content creators, large media organizations, or anywhere in between.

Related:

• Analytics, Analytics and More Analytics! | Unicorn Media Blog
• Ooyala Blog - Webinar Recap: Analytics That Drive Business Decisions
• Unicast Blog | Unicast Analytics Benchmark Report Q1 2010
• Cost-Per-Click Pricing Revolutionized Search Marketing. Our IAB Proposal to Standardize “Cost Per View” Pricing Can Do the Same for Video. | TubeMogul Blog
• comScore Announces Global Launch of Digital Analytix™, the Evolution of Web Analytics - comScore, Inc

Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics

Without detailed information on who’s watching—not to mention where, when, for how long, and on what devices—it’s impossible to prove the business value of your video communications initiative. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach. At the Online Video Platform Summit, our session, "Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics" examines not only what data you should be collecting but how to use that data to improve the effectiveness of your video and increase your ROI.

Confirmed speakers for this session include:

Paul Riismandel, Director of Curriculum Support, School of Communication, Northwestern University (Moderator)

Paul Riismandel has been working in online educational media for fifteen years, specializing in audio and video production designed for streaming. Paul is active in the educational media community as an advocate for online video and encouraging greater collaboration between the education vertical and the larger industry. He writes about these issues in the Class Act column for Streaming Media magazine. Paul is also a radio enthusiast, serving as advisor to student-run WNUR-FM at Northwestern University, and blogging about the future of radio at RadioSurvivor.com. He also blogs and podcasts about other media stuff at mediageek.net.

Brett Wilson, Co-Founder, CEO, TubeMogul

Brett leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first three years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable e-commerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired. Brett is undefeated at Risk, is the reigning Foosball champion at TubeMogul and a lousy (but aspiring) windsurfer, sailor and investor. He is also married and has two beautiful children. Brett received his MBA from the UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Bismarck C Lepe, Co-founder and President of Products, Ooyala

As an Ooyala co-founder and founding CEO, Bismarck Lepe raised $10 million in funding and signed many of the company's early media partnerships before passing the baton to Jay Fulcher in 2009. Currently, as President of Product Strategy, he is responsible for marketing and driving Ooyala's product development vision. Bismarck sits on the Ooyala Board of Directors.

Before co-founding Ooyala, Bismarck worked at Google as a Senior Product Manager, developing and managing new products for the company's AdSense network. He launched more than 25 different Google AdSense products, including Click-to-Play video ads and Google's Intelligent Ad Server, which brought the company over $1 billion dollars in new annual revenue. Most notably, Bismarck managed the early growth of AdSense display and video advertising. Business Week named Bismarck one of its Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. Bismarck has a B.A. in Economics and a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University.

AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media

AJ McGowan is responsible for engineering the cutting-edge architecture that will deliver high-quality audio and video via a highly intuitive interface. Prior to Unicorn Media, AJ spent five years at Limelight Networks where as director of solutions engineering, he assisted the company's marquee customers with implementing their content delivery networks, developing best practices, and capacity planning.

With a remarkable combination of intelligence and drive, AJ started his first company building high-end custom computers while still in the 8th grade. By age 14, he was an IT manager, and in between high school classes completed a highly technical token ring/mainframe to Ethernet/NT-Unix network upgrade and answered pages from distressed employees.

Dan Berra, Vice President of Business Intelligence, Unicast

Dan Berra leads Unicast’s Business Intelligence division focused on providing robust research, reporting and in-depth analysis of all Unicast-generated advertising campaigns. Under his leadership, clients gain greater insight into campaign results and the effectiveness of rich media and web video against other forms of online advertising As a respected industry veteran, Berra brings more than 12 years of experience spanning financial and marketing analysis at Dell Corporation and T3 (The Think Tank). Most recently, Berra served as the Vice President of the Customer Insight Group at T3, where he built media and search analytics teams from the ground up and created data integration process and databases tying together ad server data, web analytics and client-side data into one interface. Previous to T3 Berra served as transactional marketing manager, at Dell Corp, where he headed the development of segment-level online metrics, created forecasting models and managed transactional marketing. His expertise is in  media and web analytics and measurement,  rich media and online video, next generation web, online media planning and buying, ROI, online advertising and Third Party ad serving.

Dan Piech, Senior Product Management Analyst, comScore Inc.

Dan is a Senior Product Management Analyst at comScore, Inc. and President at Piech Productions. Previously, he was anInteractive Strategy Intern at McKinney, Project Manager at HG Media, Inc and Advertising Intern at Success Communications Group. comScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses.

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all t>ypes, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with
Streaming Media West in Los Angeles, the Online Video Platform Summit is designed for video publishers of all types and sizes, whether small businesses looking to publish content for the first time, independent entertainment content creators, large media organizations, or anywhere in between.

Skytide Shares Insight for Online Video Publishers, Identify the “Sweet Spot" and What is "Good Enough"

In part two of my conversation with Roy Peterkofsky, VP of Product Management at Skytide, I asked what can publishers really get from analytics that could really help monetize their businesses. Roy suggested that businesses are waking up to the fact that the online video part of their organization does need to be a real business. He recommended that people should read Warren Buffet, because all businesses make decisions based on resource allocation. Among the core challenges facing online video publishers, is how to define the "sweet spot" and what is "good enough" when it comes to the affect that quality has on viewer engagement. Quality can be defined in terms of both quality of service (QoS) of the content delivery network, and the actual quality of the content that is produced and published online.



Some digital media companies assume that "more is better" and that the road to higher profits lies in maximizing QoS levels, thinking that it will result in higher viewer engagement levels, and in turn, more consumption of their content. Roy suggested that performace-based metrics can help with editorial and content programming decisions, whether a certain genre performs better than another. Or when data shows that viewers stop watching a 5 minute video after 2 minutes, viewer drop off can impact the production of future videos and dictate their total run time. Also, since the shelf life of a video online is pretty short – to get value out of analytics, you need to be able to use the analytics predictively.

Roy said:

"People talk frequently about the need to push higher resolutions, higher bit rates out to their customers – to be as close to HD, whatever that means in the Internet world – as they can be. But the question that remains unanswered is – is it worth it? Do you really get more viewer engagement to the extent that it drives monetization out of doing this?"

According to Skytide's customer data, there is a correlation between engagement and bit rate when it's down in the lower reaches and not good enough, people will abandon the video quickly. But once you get to a level that's good enough things really start to flatten out, and you really don't get that much added value.

So what is good enough?

"Well basically, it's kind of about if you're using the maximum capability of a typical DSL line. That seems to be good enough for most people. Above and that you're spending a lot on encoding, you're spending a lot of money on pushing out bits through your CDN – and you're not getting that much return from it."

Skytide advises that publishers measure and understand the impact of online video investments before spending the money.

See part one of my interview with Roy Peterkofsky here. You can also request a copy of Skytide's white paper Streaming Video Quality: Is more always better?


About Roy Peterkofsky, Vice President of Product Management

Skytide Sees Big Changes Within the CDN Market, Releases Insight 2.0 Reporting & Analytics Solution for CDN Providers and Resellers

Skytide is a software-as-a-service company that provides reporting and analytics solutions for online video publishers and Content Delivery Networks. Today, the Oakland, California-based company announced the "next generation" of its Insight for CDNs reporting and analytics platform, upgraded to support what Skytide sees as "the innovative business models proliferating among CDN providers and resellers". Skytide has been around since 2004, and recently won a 2009 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Award for its Skytide Insight for Flash Video Players video analytics solution that combines viewer engagement and quality of service (QoS) metrics. Skytide's patented digital media performance management solutions pull high volume data from disparate data sources — like web analytics data, CDN logs and online video ad data — and integrates them into a single dashboard to help companies see the big picture of how their company works, and how the different parts are interrelated to each other.

According to Roy Peterkofsky, Skytide's VP of Product Management, it's all about resource allocation. Companies that publish and deliver online video need more advanced analytics that clearly detail how their content is used, in order to maximize their online video investments. While it's great to know about viewer engagement and quality of service, it's even better to know how quality of service affects viewer engagement – and how viewer engagement drives revenue, or sometimes not. I recently spoke with Roy about the latest release of Insight 2.0 and the significant changes his company is seeing within the content delivery space.



Roy said that:

"One of the things we're seeing is really a change in the whole digital media supply chain – where a lot of companies are going to be entering the CDN space and doing so with innovative business models. So probably 6 months or a year ago, everybody thought the CDN market was commoditizing and was going to consolidate and there's only going to be two or three or four big ones left – but interestingly enough for various reasons we're seeing a lot of new companies enter the field, often they're Telcos.

Telcos, they really own the network that the Akamais and Limelights of the worlds are operating under. So, flashback to 10 years ago to Web 1.0, the original dot-com boom, the disintermediation was big then because it was all about using the web to eliminate middle men. So if you're a Telco and you've got the Akamais and Limelights of the world making money off of your network, wouldn't you want to know – why can't I be taking the margin for myself? Why don't I disintermediate that CDN?" 

But the way Skytide sees it – it goes way beyond that, and it's really a dramatic change and disruption within the ecosystem with cable operators wanting to do TV Everywhere, Telcos moving into the CDN business, the rise of P2P networks, and what used to be an ISP can be a CDN,  or a CDN can be a conent aggregator and what used to be a publisher can be a pure content factory without its own website. Skytide is seeing it all and working with many companies that have projects that are so secret, they don't even know about them yet but they are providing the reporting and analytics for many of them.

Skytide President & CEO, Michael O’Donnell also pointed out that “seismic changes are afoot in the content delivery arena" and that Skytide's new offering will help those companies emerging to challenge CDNs hold on the content delivery market. He said:

"Those entering the space will need a reporting & analytics solution that can accommodate evolving business models and handle the massive amounts of data that CDNs generate — something that Skytide is uniquely capable of handling out of the box.”

Among the new Skytide Insight Version 2.0 features are:

• Custom Dimensions: Content delivery networks, CDN resellers and their customers and business partners can now measure traffic distribution by any desired attribute; for example, by content categories, customer types or service types.
• ISP / Business Partner Portal: Content delivery networks and resellers can stay on top of rapidly changing business models by providing business partners - like bandwidth suppliers, content owners or syndicators - with their very own reporting portals.

These new features augment Skytide's existing CDN reporting & analytics capabilities, including more than 144 distinct reports that can be used to isolate and correct service quality issues, forecast traffic and provision capacity, justify pricing and ensure accurate billing.

Not all data that CDNs provide to their customers is accurate, and Skytide has found that in some cases that data is incorrect. Roy cited a few examples where data from their system when compared to an unnamed CDN, helped in one case, improve video start up times of content in a certain Asian country that had been unnecessarily rerouted through a POP in an entirely different continent. In another case, a certain type of content that was licensed only in the U.S. found that 20% of the views came from outside the U.S. Skytide's data helped the customer close the leak of the geo-blocked content that this specific CDN missed.

Stay tuned for part two of my interview with Roy Peterkofsky where he further the discusses the changing CDN space, and how publishers can benefit from analytics to better monetize their businesses.

About Skytide
Founded in 2004, Skytide provides Digital Media Performance Management to leading digital media companies and content delivery providers with the most complete view of their operations, delivering the information necessary to make better-informed business decisions. Only Skytide's software-as-a-service and on-premise solutions can process massive amounts of disparate data sources - including CDN log files, ad insertion logs, and web analytics data - and consolidate them into a single 360° view. Skytide is venture-backed and works with leading digital media and technology companies including: Accenture subsidiary, Origin Digital; Cisco; Clear Channel Communications; Comcast subsidiary, thePlatform; IBM; MTV Networks and Qwest. Press Contact: Patrick Hurley, 510-435-9865 phurley@skytide.com
 
Skytide has a series of white papers that you can request on download here.

Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet Interview - Brian Shin, Visible Measures on True Reach and Video Engagement

In this Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet interview Peter Cervieri talks with Brian Shin, Founder and CEO of Visible Measures, a media measurement firm that provides independent third party measurement solutions for Internet video publishers and advertisers. Visible Measures specializes in measuring the consumption and viral distribution of Internet video. According to Brian, their patented technology platform integrates within existing video players to measure audience video engagement through a combination of how users interact with Internet content; the amount of interaction they have; and the viewing time independent of where that video content is, either on your sites, partners or blogger sites. Every interaction with the video content from each play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, share, embed and true reach is exposed for analysis. This helps online video publishers know if they're growing their audiences and helps video advertisers understand whether or not their brand messages are actually being delivered to their target audiences.

Brian also spoke at the Online Video Platform Summit on the Analytics Panel - Measuring Success and discussed the importance of true reach and video engagement.

In a recent post on ScribeMedia.Org, Peter Cervieri summarized some of Ben's key points on video monetization through advertising, audience engagement and reach.

Peter says,

"Reach is a metric that makes sense to advertisers.

In this respect, Visible Measures tries to give brands a sense of what they call True Reach™. For example, when a movie studio is building up to a movie launch, there are multiple types of video that connect the brand to consumers that affect reach, frequency and impact.

• paid media (buying an ad on a site such as Yahoo, ESPN, NBC, CNN.com)
• owned media (promotional video content uploaded by a brand or its agency to drive traffic and audiences to some destination controlled by the brand)
• earned media (social video and viral video - consumers embedding, emailing or remixing a brand video, or creating their own videos inspired by the brand)
• benchmark against relevant competitors"

Continue reading Peter's post on ScribeMedia.Org.

As part of a service to the industry, Visible Measures publishes a series of weekly and monthly Top 10 charts on the viral success and reach of the most watched video ads, film trailers, webisodes and viral videos. The Top 10 Viral Video Ads Chart, is updated Thursday mornings and published with Advertising Age reveals the Web's top-performing brand-driven ad campaigns. The Top 10 Film Trailers, updated Friday mornings and published with Variety showcases the Web's best-performing movie trailers. The Top 10 Webisode Series of the Month is updated at the beginning of each month and published with Mashable, highlights the Web's most-watched episodic video series. The 100 Million Club is the Web's only list of the most-watched viral videos of all time.

Just this past week Visible Measures announced that it has collaborated with BETC Euro RSCG to measure the Evian Roller Babies advertisement and compare it against the top-performing ads in online video. Visible Measures was able to accurately measure the total online viewership for Roller Babies and confirm that it has become the most-viewed online video advertisement in history. The video generated a True Reach of over 45 million views across more than 1,200 unique video placements and over 30 video destination sites.

Visible Measures' Enabling Technologies

Visible Measures' Internet video measurement solutions are powered by three core technologies, our Video Placement Multiplier, Viral Reach Database, and Video Metrics Engine. Their Video Placement Multiplier uploads videos to more than 40 video sharing sites in a single step while providing you with control over brand placement. Their Viral Reach Database gives you complete visibility into viral video placements and audience growth by tracking more than 200 million videos across 150+ video-sharing destinations. Their Video Metrics Engine processes viewer engagement with millions of video streams everyday in real-time, recording every interaction by every viewer from every video on your network.

Related

• The Viral Video Research Blog | Visible Measures
• About Visible Measures
• Brian's blog Hungry Yet Humble - A blog about entrepreneurship from the front lines of a growing startup
• ScribeMedia.Org: The Business, Technology and Culture of Digital Media | Brian Shin - Visible Measures
• Visible Measures Partners with BETC Euro RSCG to Measure Record-Breaking Evian Roller Babies Internet Video Advertisement
• Beet.TV: Going Deep on Video Viewing Metrics: Visible Measures Tracks Audience Engagement

Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet Interview - Ben Weinberger, Digitalsmiths on the Importance of Metadata

In this Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet interview Peter Cervieri talks with Ben Weinberger, CEO and Co-founder of Digitalsmiths, the leading indexing and analysis company that creates advanced time-based metadata and publishing solutions for clients like Warner Bros., Telepictures and TMZ.com. Ben also spoke at the Online Video Platform Summit on the Analytics Panel - Measuring Success about how do you collect all of your audience data and metrics, what do you with it and how do you effectively monetize your video.

Digitalsmiths just announced yesterday, the newest version of its flagship product, VideoSense® 2.5. The new version adds enhanced video intelligence and monetization tools including: direct asset upload, advanced clip creation, YouTube integration and a new reporting dashboard for analytics. Digitalsmiths focuses exclusively on Tier 1 content (TV Shows, movies and sports for Hollywood studios, broadcasters, distributors and publishers) using a variety of computer vision, speech algorithm, facial recognition, scene classification and object identification to build a unique and deep metadata framework.

Digitalsmiths was founded while Ben was still in college at Southern Illinois University and was originally a Web design company. In 2002, they began indexing TV show content for TV studio clients, for example, reporting on how things like how many times Kramer mentioned Cuban cigars on "Seinfeld" or where certain scenes took place, at Jerry's apartment or the diner. In 2005, the company began developing a system for automated analysis of time-based metadata which became VideoSense. Their technology was developed by a team that Co-founder and CTO Matt Berry assembled comprising of computer vision scientists out of places like NASA, the FBI, academia and Fortune 500 companies.

Ben offers this advise to media companies and publishers to better measure success:

"You need to come at the publishing process from a holistic approach of, it's not just broadband and it's broadband as a separate business, it's an integrated digital media workflow that you absolutely have to have data. If you don't have data, you're publishing a dumb asset. Your asset is at a a disadvantage compared to every other asset that we're involved with. So put all the data around it, look at ways to generate revenue today and tomorrow that you're going to usethat asset. And once you make a blue print of that asset you can use it over and over again. You don't have to reinvent the wheel."

How VideoSense® 2.5 works

Digitalsmiths’ suite of visual interpretation tools processes each frame of video using proprietary algorithms such as facial recognition, scene classification and object identification to build a unique metadata framework – or MetaFrame – of informed video tags. Specific time-based metatags are assigned across a rich set of variables that go beyond common descriptors like name and date with criteria related to each frame (people, places, objects, dialogue, subject matter) or critical commercial matters such as rights management (geography, music issues, content sharing permissions, licensing concerns). This provides content owners powerful analytics, reporting and search capabilities bundled with publishing tools for direct revenue through syndication and ad targeting and audience building.

Related:

• Read Ben's ReelSEO interview on Image and Speech Recognition in Video SEO: The Digitalsmith interview
• See Ben's Beet.TV interview Beet.TV: A New Frontier in Video Search: Facial and Scene Recognition Converted to Metadata
• Read FierceOnlineVideo Leaders - Ben Weinberger, CEO Digitalsmiths - FierceOnlineVideo
• Read Ben's post-Online Video Platform Summit thoughts on the OVP market, Mapping the Wild West | www.digitalsmiths.com

The Summer of Online Video

Online video reached another all-time high in July according to comScore with a total of 21.4 billion videos viewed during the month. I know what you're saying, another post in the echo chamber about the explosion of online video... and you're right, because that's what I talk about here on this blog and I think it's more than a year-over-year trend that we're seeing but a sea change. When 158 million U.S. Internet users -- or 80% of the nation's online population -- watched online video in the month July, I think it's fair to say that this is, "The Summer of Online Video".

comScore noted that TV viewers turned to the Internet for fresh content with shows on summer hiatus and Hulu reached all-time high with 457 million video views. While the average online video viewer watches short-form content, we're starting to see a shift to long-form content viewing as more choices become available. With the lackluster pick of summer blockbusters it's no wonder people are staying out of the movie theaters and going online for their entertainment.

Some of the views can also be attributed to unusual media events that became phenomena as comScore tracked in the June numbers:

"including the memorial service for Michael Jackson and the civil unrest in Iran. Such major events have been important for online video viewing in the past, with many users checking out news videos during the workday."

Other notable findings from July 2009 included:

The top video ad networks in terms of their actual delivered reach were: Tremor Video Network (20.1 percent viewer penetration), Brightroll Video Network (17.4 percent), and BroadbandEnterprises.com (14.4 percent).


81.0 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.


The average online video viewer watched 500 minutes of video, or 8.3 hours.


120.3 million viewers watched 8.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (74.1 videos per viewer).


48.2 million viewers watched 518.6 million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).


The average Hulu viewer watched 12.0 videos, totaling 1 hour and 13 minutes of videos per viewer.


The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

In a related report the Nielsen Company's July 2009 VideoCensus noted a 42% year-over-year growth in viewing time of unique users averaging about 3.5 hours with total video streams climbing 31.4% to 11.2 billion, and a 14.2% increase in unique viewers to 136 million.

Different companies, different numbers -- we see it all the time. But how are they actually tracking the views?

According to Nielsen,

"Online video viewing is tracked according to video player, which can be used on site or embedded elsewhere on the Web. For example, if a “Saturday Night Live” clip from NBC.com is embedded on a personal blog, that video would be attributed to NBC because of the NBC video player. A unique viewer is anyone who viewed a full episode, part of an episode or a program clip during the month. A stream is a program segment. VideoCensus measurement does not include video advertising."

Also, as noted by the many posts on ReelSEO, video usage is up for marketers and based on new findings from Equation Research Christopher Rick stated that online video tops all but Facebook in social media marketing usage.

While many analysts say these recent estimates are still only 1% to 3% of the total video viewing experience, with traditional broadcast TV viewing still on top, it's clear we're in a very transformational time as we shift to a more social and video-centric society. We're able to maintain our presence online through mobile and Wi-Fi connections, broadcast live or upload videos, lifestreams and status updates from our mobile devices. An entire online video ecosystem has emerged over the last few years and I wouldn't be surprised to see "Video" on the cover of Time magazine as the "Person of the Year" ;-)

Updated: New 60's inspired image

TubeMogul 2.0 Democratizes Online Video Analytics, Sets New Standard for Viewing Metrics

Leading web video distribution and analytics company TubeMogul recently launched TubeMogul 2.0 which "democratizes video metrics" by providing free video tracking capabilities that were once exclusive only to large media companies and advertisers. TubeMogul's powerful InPlay technology, incorporated into their platform from their acquisition of video analytics firm Illumenix, was previously only available to sites hosting their own video, but is now integrated on 15 of the Web's top video sharing sites, including Brightcove, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, blip.tv, Break.com, Howcast, eBaum’s World, Graspr, GrindTV, Sclipo, Webcastr, Viddler, 5min, Streetfire.net and Sevenload -- with more to come soon. TubeMogul says they are in talks with YouTube, who along with Hulu are not among the sites included.

So for the first time ever, video publishers can gain access to a single, standardized set of rich, census-based analytics that can be seen and compared in a single dashboard, aggregating data from the Web's top video sites, unlocking rich, standardized data measuring far beyond the metric of video “views,” including per-second audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, audience geography and much more. TubeMogul hopes that this public, census-based data will democratize viewing behavior online far more than the simple metric of video “views,” which are counted on most sites as soon as a video stream starts.

These metrics will be free to most of its 85,000 users but commercial sites and ad agencies will have to pay. As TubeMogul indicates, "In a world where panel-based data can yield such wildly divergent numbers, it’s important to have an independent, census-based standard, which we hope to become." 

Liz Gaines points out that a lack of standard measurement has led to conflicting reports and in light of the recent controversy surrounding the war of numbers between Nielsen and Hulu and the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence's Video Consumer Mapping Study report this past week which stated that online video usage is "vastly overstated" it's clear that TubeMogul has taken a huge step to lead the effort towards standardization. 

I spoke with Mark Rotblat, VP of Sales and Marketing for TubeMogul back in March and he gave me the scoop on the upcoming release of TubeMogul 2.0. Mark said that TubeMogul 2.0 was always part of their plan and their acquisition on Illumenix helped them acheive their goal of providing a powerful analytics suite for their worldwide customer base. Mark also talked about TubeMogul Marketplace and said that more than anything TubeMogul is a promotion platform.

Tim Street shared his 3 reasons why he hates TubeMogul 2.0 and recorded a video with Brett Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of TubeMogul who describes the exciting news and what it means for independent producers. "In the industry, this level of data was previously only available to large advertisers and top video destinations, and usually only for their own site," comments Brett. "We now track this type of data globally and are giving it away." 

Michael Greer, VP of Product Development at The Onion, which beta-tested the product says that TubeMogul 2.0, "has allowed us to understand our audience better, as well as to more precisely monitor our business needs."  Additionally, Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3, who has been a strong advocate for honesty and transparency in online video metrics also beta-tested the product, echoed similar feedback, "Knowing which shows are the most engaging to viewers is helpful in selling advertising and devoting resources."

About TubeMogul 

TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers 
large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web's top video sharing sites. TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched. TubeMogul offers tracking far beyond the traditional metric of video "views." TubeMogul InPlay, which can be activated within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance -- all in real-time. 

For more information about TubeMogul, contact: 

David Burch 
david@tubemogul.com 
+1 510 653 0501

Related:

• TubeMogul Blog » Say Hello To TubeMogul 2.0. We Hope You Like It
  
• tubemogul (tubemogul) on Twitter
  
• A New Era in Video Metrics has Arrived - Tubemogul 2.0
  
• Measuring Up the Online Video Measurers
  
• Hulu vs. Nielsen The War of Numbers
  
• MediaPost Publications Study Finds Online Video Usage Dramatically Overstated 06/03/2009
  
• 3 Things I Hate About TubeMogul 2.0
  
• The Lies Must Stop : Jim Louderback

VatorNews - Ooyala To Launch Pay-Per-Play Transaction Model For Video

Ooyala has been working on making the viewing experience more meaningful for online video consumers and more lucrative for online video publishers. The online video technology company recently integrated with a number of different ad servers and networks from YuMe Networks , Tremor Media , DoubleClick Inc. , AOL LLC 's Lightningcast, and Google's AdSense for Video that has support for both overlay as well as in-streaming companion ads, including pre-roll, post-roll, and mid-roll. Content owners can use their own ad networks or tap into Ooyala's integrated offering. Ooyala has also recently integrated Nirvanix, the premier "Cloud Storage" platform provider and its Storage Delivery Network(TM) (SDN) into their Backlot video management platform.

Meliza Solan of Vator.tv posted this entrepreneur interview with Ooyala founders, Bismarck Lepe, Sean Knapp, and Belsasar Lepe, Bambi Francisco which she says, "dives into the future of online advertising. In the interview, Bismarck Lepe talks about how Ooyala plans to launch in the first quarter, a subscription capability for its clients."

See this video on Vator.tv »

In 2008, with about a billion dollars spent in online video advertising Ooyala sees the opportunities in 2009 moving more to a transactional "pay-per-play" subscription model which puts the control back in the hands of the online video consumer and gives online video publishers greater margins to monetize their content. In addition Ooyala is rolling out new ad serving platform with advanced planning, analysis, and management options which will enable another tier of networks, distributors, and content creators to operate more effectively.

Their tools give dynamic control over the content and how the ads are served which helps content owners better learn about the end users. Co-founder and CEO Bizmarck Lepe defines that Ooyala is primarily in the enablement business and said, "

"Everyone talks about behavioral targeting. Well I don't necessarily think behavioral targeting works very well in terms of creating a dynamic learning system if you can actually learn from what is causing a certain behavior. So what we do is we actually analyze the video as the video is going through and we extract meta information and then based on behavior we tie it back to what was actually happening on the screen. So if we notice that someone is always fast forwarding through ads whenever there are car ads and whenever they're watching a soap opera then we'll make sure that that mapping of ads to that type of content never happens again."

About going beyond the pre-roll and post-roll and where online advertising is going in 2009 Bismarck Lepe has this to say,

"So when we think about advertising, I think people have it all wrong. It should be about monetization. It's about figuring out what monetization model works best for content A and person B. If we know that an individual is actually very willing to purchase a piece of content, why should we bore them with that? They should have the ability to pay for that individual stream and pay 5 cents or pay 10 cents.

If you think about it. If you build a very simple, transactional model, where they click once and it's tied to their PayPal account, and they only pay 10 cents, over a thousand people that's a $100 CPM. So that's what we're exploring. Obviously, we're continuing to do the pre-roll and the post-roll and the overlays. And what we've found there is you need to make sure that the ad is compelling to the end user, the ad complements the content, but in a lot of cases it's actually better that you directly give the opportunity for the end user to pay for that piece of content."

Read the full transcript from the video here:
VatorNews - Ooyala to launch transaction model for video
Online video monetization isn't just about ads, but pay-for-play

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December 30, 2008

Ooyala founders: Sprint in the same direction

Lepe brothers and Sean Knapp share team hug and advice to entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur interview by Bambi Francisco
December 19, 2008

Ooyala founders share their grand vision

Video delivery and advertising platform wants to serve soup-to-nuts to the head-to-tail

About Ooyala
Ooyala is a video technology company that provides an integrated platform enabling the delivery, management, and monetization of high quality video content. Focused on innovation and scalability, Ooyala is committed to providing the most comprehensive video solutions to companies worldwide.Ooyala is headquartered in Mountain View, Ca with sales operations in New York, NY and London, UK.

Ooyala was founded in early 2007 by Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe and Bismarck Lepe - all former Google employees. While at Google, they worked on the development and launch of various monetization and content distribution products such as AdSense, AdWords and Google Web Search. After four years of engineering and product development at the biggest Internet company in the world, the three left Google to start Ooyala. Ooyala has raised over 10 million dollars in funding and has in excess of 5000 publishers using its syndication platform - Backlot. Ooyala's goal is to build a successful technology company that focuses on delivering the best video experience to video content providers, advertisers and most importantly consumers.

Neilsen is Listening in For Online Video Views

With the push for more targeted online video viewing experiences content creators and aggregators are using an evolving set of tools to analyze viewing data. Beet.tv recently spoke with Jon Gibs, VP for Media at Nielsen in December about their new system to track online video views on multiple sites through distinct "audio signature file." Andy Plesser and Gibbs discuss the big changes ahead in making online video monitoring and metrics more complete.

"One of the most significant efforts underway is the development of "audio signature files" -- Jon explains that each show has a distinct audio file and that file can be monitored on various sites where the segment is seen." - Beet.TV: Nielsen to Track Online Video Consumption with Audio Signature Files