Getting Online Video to Measure Up - Dan Piech, comScore

2010 was massive year growth for online video, throughout the industry and the way consumers accessed video content. Analysts are seeing a sharp rise in online video viewing compared to traditional television, which has huge implications for online video advertising and marketing.

According to Dan Piech, Senior Analyst with comScore, the best way online video publishers and marketers create and sustain value is through differentiation, and the way you do that is through data.

"It's not just about understanding your audience," Piech says, "but then putting together a pitch that sells that audience to advertisers."

Piech says that online publishers will not have the reach of a television audience, and for small publishers it will be even harder. So he suggests that publishers find that niche audience, develop it and sell that niche based on what you've learned about it from your metrics, because the agencies are not going to do that for you. He says that digital market intelligence services like comScore help you better understand your audience.

comScore believes that they have the most accurate methodology for measuring digital media. Each month, the digital media measurement firm comScore releases its Online Video Rankings from its Video Metrix service, with the most recent one from May 2011, that showed 83.3% of the U.S. Internet audience (176 million) watched online video content in May for an average of 15.9 hours per viewer. Video ads accounted for 12.6% of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

How comScore gets at the data is a secret sauce merged from two sources. The first source is a panel of two million Internet users worldwide that they track their behavior. So they're able to understand where they are watching videos, how long they're watching videos, get a good sense of unique viewers, and project that to the total populations. The second source is census-level data collection method, and comScore works with all the top publishers in the video and ...