Nielsen’s announcement yesterday marks something a lot bigger than just a way to measure the relevance of sites that use AJAX. While folks like Steve Rubel correctly predicted the death of the page view metric some time ago , this new announcement does more: it lays down the foundation for measuring and monetizing the Media Web. This is a great example of the difference between the “fetch-a-page-of-text” web and ad model and the emerging interactive Media Web driven by live, time-variant experiences, like video.
Video context (and user intent) changes from moment to moment, creating additional monetization opportunities. The longer you keep the user around, the more opportunities you have to monetize, if your advertising approach is sophisticated enough to take advantage of that engagement.
One way to keep users around is to give them opportunities to interact with and control their media. Early experiments at DoubleClick shows that users interact with video at an astonishing rate, up to 29%. With our HearHere and SeeHere technology we give users the ultimate incentive to interact and engage, the ability to find what they want, and jump to it.
Once again, giving users control and convenience pays off: In our early deployments we’ve seen providing search increases user time with the media by 200%. For users that actually do search within the show, that goes up to 300%. This means potentially 2-3x more monetization.
Nielsen’s new measurement approach will become even more significant once advertising systems and models catch up. Virtually all ad business on the Internet is still focused on fetch-a-page-of-text, the entire business model was designed when page views still mattered. In this scenario, ad context is determined once and fixed for each show or clip when it is retrieved from the server. This is why, assuming a status quo approach to advertising, webpages seem to monetize better than videos, as this post on NewTeeVee points out.
At Pluggd, we change that by providing additional opportunities to monetize as video context changes and the user interacts and searches. And withSeeHere and HearHere, we help keep the user around to see those ads, because as this announcement from Nielsen points out, minutes are what matter most on the Media Web.
2 Comments
Hear Hear (pun intended), Cornelius.
Interacting with content, especially when there’s a focus on creating high quality content in the first place, is key in regards to providing value for users and advertisers alike. I’m very excited to see folks in the industry get how important folks like Pluggd are in regards to monetizing online collateral effectively in the present and future versus models that don’t apply from the past.
Marketing Sherpa also has a great issue on metrics in new media and the idea of measuring engagement by events – i.e. how many people took the time to comment on your blog post :)
2 Trackbacks
[...] This week Nielsen/NetRatings announced the addition of a “total minutes” metric to its traffic reporting that measure the time visitors spend on sites, a shift that, as noted on the Pluggd Blog, bodes well for sites that keep visitors engaged with interactive media like video. As the all-mighty “page view” is made obsolete by page-efficient sites using Rich Internet Application (RIA) tecnologies like Ajax, time spent on a site will become an increasingly important metric to advertisers and investors. [...]
[...] This week Nielsen/NetRatings announced the addition of a “total minutes†metric to its traffic reporting that measure the time visitors spend on sites, a shift that, as noted on the Pluggd Blog, bodes well for sites that keep visitors engaged with interactive media like video. As the all-mighty “page view†is made obsolete by page-efficient sites using Rich Internet Application (RIA) tecnologies like Ajax, time spent on a site will become an increasingly important metric to advertisers and investors. [...]