• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 19, 2013

It’s no secret that consumers’ ever more mobile and varied viewing habits are creating new challenges for media companies and their monetization efforts. How companies should respond is less well known.  
 
In one approach, Crackle and comScore have entered into a new audience measurement agreement, which is designed to produce unduplicated audience size and demographics across Sony Picture Television’s ad-supported video streaming service.
 
“We can now provide advertisers with measurement that includes the audience size and demographics across all of Crackle,” Eric Berger, GM of Crackle and EVP of digital networks for Sony Pictures Television, said on Tuesday.
 
Competing against Nielsen and newer media-tracking services, comScore is betting that its census-level measurement will provide enough common touchpoints between each platform to determine cross-platform overlap.
 
“Our development of this multiplatform attribution technique cracked the code for determining a single unified audience number across platforms,” said Serge Matta, president of commercial solutions at comScore.
 
“This is an important first step in giving media companies the credit they deserve in delivering audiences to advertisers across a variety of touchpoints,” Matta added.
 
By the second quarter of the year, the partners promise to make data available, which should paint a clearer picture of Crackle’s audience and its media consumption behavior.
 
Founded as Grouper in 2004, Sony bought Crackle for a reported $65 million in 2006. While the video hub has historically lacked the breadth of a Hulu or Netflix, it has increasingly sought to differentiate itself as a fully ad-supported on-demand service.