Tracking the Internet Video Audience

Joseph Laszlo | September 26, 2006, 05:53 PM

One of the frustrating things about online video has been the paucity of data on just how much video's being viewed and by whom. We've got some great data (clients should definitely inquire) from the consumers' point of view, but consumers' perceptions of their video consumption is only part of the total story.

So interesting to see Comscore launch a video tracking service. According to the data it has released, about 7.2 billion video streams were "initiated" in July. (I'm assuming that means Comscore's not vouching for whether people watched the whole thing or not.) And about 106.5m people streamed videos in total.

Even better, Comscore has a top-10 video sites list, with, at the top, not YouTube but MySpace. This kind of makes sense to me; MySpace is hosting tons of band videos, and they get lots of viewers (in fact, 37m in July).

Marketwatch says that Comscore's tracking gives credit to the site that hosts the video, not the venue where the video is viewed. So, for example, if you stick a Youtube video in your myspace page and I watch it, I'm a Youtube "unique streamer" not a myspace streamer. Which is reasonable, and avoids double counting.

This methodology underscores how important syndication is for short-form video today, too...as of July Youtube.com had about 16m unique visitors, but 30m unique streamers...as I read that, it implies that on the order of half the videos it delivered came from sites outside Youtube.com.

For the record, Comscore's numbers suggest quite a bit more people are watching video than our survey data would indicate...but it's early days and we're glad to help clients understand the inevitable disparities in data on video from different sources.