The Online Video View: We Can Count It, But Can We Count On It?

Media|The Online Video View: We Can Count It, but Can We Count on It?https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/business/media/the-online-video-view-we-can-count-it-but-can-we-count-on-it.html

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ONE OF THE great promises of online videos was the potential to measure precisely how effective they were: Audiences reported not through inexact ratings and surveys but directly, down to the person and the millisecond he or she spent watching.

For the most part, that promise has been realized. Digital audiences are nothing if not minutely monitored.

But an abundance of data, largely self-reported by internet platforms that are in direct competition with one another, presents a challenge of its own. Namely, what numbers are truly reliable?

Consider the closest thing the industry has to a basic, universal metric — the video view.

Facebook counts a video as viewed after it has played for just three seconds, as does Twitter. Vine, in which videos are mostly limited to six-second loops, counts a view once a video has been watched to completion. Snapchat, which does not publicly display the number of views, counts users’ posts as viewed after one second.

Instagram, which hosts up to one-minute videos, registers a view after three seconds. Vimeo, which hosts videos that can be much longer, counts a view instantly, as does Twitch, on which broadcasts can last hours. YouTube has never fully disclosed its methods for counting views, but industry insiders have divined that it is somewhere around 30 seconds.

For decades, TV viewership was measured primarily by one company, Nielsen, and expressed as relatively straightforward ratings — a currency upon which 30- and 60-second television ads were bought and sold. Digital video pairs more precise measurement with a vast proliferation of metrics and formats: videos viewed live, or later; on phones, computers or other devices; with obvious intention, after a search, or more incidentally, as in a feed filled with other posts; for seconds, minutes or hours.

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