• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, August 6, 2012

A pet food maker wanting to expand its reach with online video might choose to put ad money into SimonsCat on YouTube, the top performer in the pet and animals category, or it could simply buy tonnage across the top ten best-performing creators in the genre. By that same token, a marketer wanting to reach audiences interested in extreme sports could segment them out in the online video world using the just-launched media buying and planning platform OpenSlate from online video ad company Outrigger Media.

OpenSlate is a video content marketplace that offers ranking, measurement and analysis of top online video producers, drawing from a database of more than 10,000 online video creators. OpenSlate measures channels by engagement, looking at how long the video holds attention and generates interaction, as well as influence by measuring the additional reach and impact a creator has through social media, and consistency by tracking the performance over time.

Mike Henry, CEO of Outrigger Media, tells me that there are more than 12,000 producers on YouTube with more than 10,000 subscribers, underscoring the ad opportunities in niche video publishing. But tracking or buying each producer individually may be cumbersome -- and that’s where a tool like OpenSlate could help. Media planners can use it to zero in on one producer’s performance or to view audiences across categories. “Quality is subjective, but it can be measured,” Henry said. OpenSlate’s scoring algorithms crunch a number of data points such as comments to views or comments to subscribers and other ratio-based measures to indicate engagement, for instance. The so-called “SlateScore” ranking can give buyers a way to draw a line if they’re buying tonnage, Henry said.

There have been previous efforts to quantify the value of online producers when it comes to marketing, so only time will tell whether OpenSlate takes off with media buyers. But it’s a promising tool to add to media plans because it offers a way to apply the necessary rigor that media buyers seek when expanding into the broader reaches of online video.

“It gets pretty interesting on the price front. We’re seeing a wide range of CPMs for channels with very similar SlateScores. Poor visibility into what really is high quality in native digital video has created an inefficiency in the market,” Henry said.