Online Video Statistics.
Posted Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 9:59 am by Rahul Singh (7 posts)
With the advent of Web 2.0, services such as YouTube.com made the idea of video publishing and hosting a commonplace activity for amateurs, hosting its videos for free, and carrying advertisements on its pages.
With the online video frenzy, ad agencies have capitalized on this burgeoning industry of amateur producers, and in a couple of instances, even commissioned to the populace to make Superbowl ads. Now, there are specialized online hosting services in niche markets serving the needs of advertising agencies, businesses, and political campaigns to serve video content.
Now, more than ever, the popularity of an online video can directly translate into money and success, whether it is in the form of ad revenue, donations, or advocacy conversion. This makes the tracking of video statistics more important than ever.
There are several reasons someone could be interested in online video statistics. If you’re a cost-conscious webmaster paying for bandwidth, you will want to track the actual transfer of bytes over the internet, and not necessarily how many times a video is viewed. In paying for advertising, it is more important to measure how many unique people watched a video, or how many times these people watched the video all the way through. TubeMogul is helping organizations answer these and other important questions. TubeMogul’s name has been coming up at Web 2.0 and Social Networking events. While their authority on the topic has yet to be fully proven, their research looks impressive.
In May of 2008, the company published an updated “What Counts as a View?” which “discusses the findings of an experiment to test which actions result in a ’view‘ as measured on 14 online video websites. There are other interesting pieces about how online video views are driving donations to presidential candidates.
Looking through Tubemogul’s research, you can get the notion of how a video’s popularity impacts different social groups and different interested parties, seeking to benefit from the video’s popularity. As a service, TubeMogul provides a broadcast mechanism to push video content from one central location to multiple sites and then aggregate the video views from those different sites into one dashboard which lets users track video statistics from 12 video sites at once (Screen shot). You can get a more descriptive overview of their services at their site.
Also of interest is Compete.com’s blog. This interesting blog offers the Video Market Share 
measured in April for the top 20 Video Hosting sites. With GooTube (Google Video/YouTube) at the top with 50% market share and with a steady growth month by month, it seems to be the Tiger Woods of the video world.
