The Wall Street Journal’s Aaron Rutkoff devotes his column today to a little-known site that’s onto a very big concept. The Internet TV Charts is the brainchild of British journalist and entrepreneur Alx Klive and its mission is to post popularity rankings for online video.
Internet TV Charts currently only monitors Google Video, Digg, VideoSift and YouTube, automatically pulling the most popular clips from those sites once a week and putting them into a simple interface with thumbnail pictures. It’s not entirely objective — Klive will weed out freakish hits (e.g. those that are the result of manipulation) and offers editorial commentary on the popularity of the videos.
The big idea that Klive is embracing is the creation of a measurement system for web video viewing. None exists in good form today and as surely as the sun rises in the east, advertisers are going to want good statistics on the videos they sponsor. Although the web is a different medium from TV in that click-through data are almost bullet-proof measures of an ad’s effectiveness, video advertising (or even .gif or text-based advertising embedded in videos) is a much more elusive form of marketing.
Sometimes video ads are “clickable” and sometimes they’re not. Even when they are easily measured by click-throughs, impressions still count, particularly where image advertising or general brand advertising is involved. Right now, it’s a stab in the dark for most advertisers, but it won’t stay that way — they will want hard data.
However rudimentary Internet TV charts is (Klive likens it to the “Billboard” of videos), it’s a tiny step toward somehow measuring the relative reach of a small group of web sites. That’s a good start on a big idea.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:35 AM|Comments(0)
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