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Quantcast Launches Video and Widget Measurement
Web measurement company Quantcast has launched a new measurement tool for widgets and videos. They note, "Video and Widget Measurement: We now offer free video and widget measurement services with the ability to track any Flash-based file – including games. These new capabilities help you track the web-wide distribution of your media elements and demonstrate your true network reach."
Check out the specifications for the ActionScript tags if you are interested in implementation.
I like Quantcast and believe they could be the big winner in this space but they need everyone to use the tool to be effective. If 10 sites in an industry use it and the other 80 don't, it's not going to produce effective industry reporting. But compared to Alexa (and to a good extent Compete) it's pretty awesome.
Check out our previous Quantcast, Compete and Alexa coverage.
Hopefully if they get the right 10 sites everyone else feels the pressure to hop on board. comScore and Nielsen want to measure this stuff too (and I know they are looking at it if not already measuring it). Hopefully the video sites will be like you Allen, and have no problem putting in multiple tracking tagging.
I don’t know how effective it will be as a useful measuring tool until there is some kind of comparitive measurement for measuring time spent viewing vs. viewing anything. There are many videos I “press play” on, see the video quality is horrible and stop watching immediately. I sample way more videos than I actually wind up watching. In some ways this is similar to your hits vs. page views/subscribers vs. readers discussion.
I think it’s a *great* start though and I really hope it catches on.