The Video View

Everyone knows that the amount of video being viewed online is going up but how do you prove that for an individual site? For the benefit of their sites and content – this is pretty useful information but as in this case with Crackle – it also helps to sell to the advertisers that support the site and make all the content possible. Check here for the Omniture blog post about it.

If you don’t know Omniture then it is worth spending a few minutes undertanding what they do. They measure website performance in amongst a few other things. If they are really starting to take video seriously then I think that that is a good thing. After all – in online advertising it is very hard to sell what you cannot measure and if one of the larger site analytics companies starts to make video measurement as easy as possible then that will be a benefit to the industry.

The majority of the video ad-serving companies will provide measurements about any in-stream ads that are shown but site analytics can be used to measure the actual content, the challenge is making the data make sense to the people that need it. In order to do this they have come up with the concept of ROV (Return on Video), the basic premise of this is – is it worth us renewing a certain show or not. If a show is popular then maybe it should be promoted differently to an unpopular one. There is no point pumping programming dollars into a show that no-one really wants to watch after all.