What may be surprising to those executives is that technology for measuring Internet video generally focuses on video content served on-site, not off-site. It's fairly straightforward for a Web analytics tool to tell you how people are consuming and interacting with on-site video, but consumption and interaction of videos distributed across multiple sites, perhaps virally or via social media campaigning, aren't directly measurable by Web analytics tools. Panel-based technologies can approximate certain off-site measures of video consumption and distribution, but don't provide very deep on-site metrics.
Measurements of Internet video consumption, interaction, and distribution may be categorized as follows:
Those categories form a framework for Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) that help to identify how people interact with videos, how videos perform when compared to other videos, and against pre-defined business goals. Analysis of KPIs enables video content to be tailored to maximize performance. Example KPI's include:
Instream KPI's:
Outstream KPI's:
These KPIs are measurable using a Web analytics tool, and perhaps a few of them are possible using traditional panel-based measurement. But if off-site video distribution creates a whole new set of challenges to using current analytics and audience measurement tools to track instream and outstream metrics and KPIs, what are publishers and advertisers to do? It's a business problem that demands a new technology solution for understanding audience behavior, consumption, and distribution patterns of off-site syndicated or viral video content.
So what would a new technology solution for measuring Internet video and audience behavior do? First it would have to fill the gap between panel and census-based measurement systems in a way that helps both publishers and advertisers -- not just one or the other -- understand audience reach, frequency, and behavior. The technology must enable tracking and actionable reporting and dashboarding of key metrics and KPIs, distribution patterns, behaviors, and interactions regardless of where the video "goes" on the Internet. Audience characteristics from external databases (like OpenID for example) and internal company databases (like subscription and registration dbs) should be able to be integrated with data collected about behavior, video metadata, and instream and outstream metrics.
If measuring digital video is as important as eight out of 10 media and entertainment executives believe it to be, there are some huge money-making opportunities on the horizon -- for companies that are already providing technology for tackling this emerging business need, for advertisers using Internet video to drive awareness and response, and for measurement professionals who can help make sense of the Internet video ecosystem, solve measurement challenges, identify significant business opportunities, and use video metrics to improve business performance. We're certainly at the beginning of the J-curve for Internet video measurement for both publishers and advertisers. After all, Forrester predicts Internet video advertising spend to increase from $471 million last year to $7.1 billion in 2012.