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Introducing the Global Video Measurement Alliance

Neil Patil – January 30, 2019

With massive growth expectations in digital video comes massive pressure to deliver high CPM video monetization. We know that content and audience are both there, but we have seen recent headwinds in the media industry, further proof that it is still challenging to find the right metrics to accurately measure, understand, optimize and demonstrate digital audience performance. Without a standard for content measurement that proves to brands and agencies the true reach, engagement and effectiveness of any publisher or creator, digital media can’t succeed and traditional media can’t expand its digital investments. Today, we are proud to announce we have joined forces with VICE, BuzzFeed and Group Nine to tackle this challenge. Our first step is collaboration on new global audience measurement standards, through an initiative dubbed the Global Video Measurement Alliance (GVMA). We’re excited to bring together this group and establish the GVMA to help solve this existential crisis in media and provide a trusted standard through which the future economics of digital media will take shape. After a year of research, these top digital publishers embraced Tubular and the GVMA initiative to create new global engagement scoring, providing advertisers with the opportunity to ultimately understand the actual monetary value of their branded content and online video spend. "Existing content measurement solutions do not adequately measure against the KPIs brands are interested in most. We all know the time spent engaging with content is proven to increase brand recall and lift but is still an afterthought,” said Josh Cogswell, President of Digital at VICE. “I’m excited about the opportunity for Tubular Labs and GVMA to help advertisers better gauge our premium, high impact ad opportunities.” “Uniform cross-platform measurement is crucial to establishing the video ad unit economics required for digital media to thrive, and all publishers should be aligned and pushing for consistent standards in 2019 and beyond,” said Edwin Wong, Senior Vice President of Research and Insights at BuzzFeed. “We are excited to join our fellow publishers and Tubular for their new initiative to grow the global measurement standards.” "As audiences continue to shift to mobile, and digital video advertising continues to grow simultaneously, standardizing global measurement is crucial to the evolution of our industry," said Ashish Patel, Chief Insights Officer at Group Nine Media. "We're a data-conscious media company built on mobile video and so we're extremely excited to join forces with like-minded companies to better understand and serve audiences and brand partners around the world." We’re excited in our mission to help create the standard for online video measurement. See what AdAge has to say about this effort. And this is only the beginning. Our next step: the GVMA will continue to expand participation with other media, agency and brand partners and work to finalize metric standards over the first half of 2019. We are full-speed ahead on incorporating our past year of R&D and our continued work with our GVMA partners into the Tubular product offering. Stay tuned in the coming months for more about this. Now our question to you: are you interested in helping drive the initiative that will shift social video into a more dynamic and transparent economy of scale? If that sounds like you, contact Tubular to learn more about how to get involved!

The New Intelligence for Showrunners

Feng Hong – September 12, 2018

If you are reading this, we probably don’t have to tell you the obvious importance of online and social video. Today, social video has already become an integral part of audience engagement for content businesses. That is why Tubular was founded six years ago to develop what is now the most comprehensive online video intelligence platform that measures the performance of over four billion videos across multiple social video networks. But while the importance of social video has become obvious, there is a person behind the scenes (literally) that we need to bring forth and spotlight. This person, termed the “Showrunner”, is a video content strategist making the decisions to create and distribute the right content that is highly engaging. To confidently make those decisions, the Showrunner needs direction around the content that performs, backed by data. This is why we want to announce our New Intelligence, Tubular's improved platform that was developed with the insights-driven Showrunner in mind. Tubular has launched New Intelligence to instantly surface insights that help you confidently make content strategy decisions. Now, customers are provided with instant performance comparisons in three key areas: Content characteristics, such as video duration, day of upload, platform, genre Historical Creator performance trends Video and Creator Intelligence search results 1) Performance Insights This latest version of the Intelligence platform now includes Performance Insights, which visualizes the performance of video characteristics so you can easily identify the types of videos that succeed. Let's see this in action. Let's say you are exploring "react" style videos. In the above screenshot, we used Performance Insights to search for “react” videos and quickly show how different video durations performed on YouTube. We can see that 10-15 minute videos performed the best in terms of views and views per video. This can inspire your strategy for creating your "react" video content. In a few clicks, you’re able to compare video metrics by platform, creator type, genre, duration, day of upload, and other segmentations that matter most in driving optimal performance of your content. "With Performance Insights, I am prepared to quickly respond when asked for the optimal video length for our videos. Insights such as video duration performance guide editorial decision-making and save my team time." Stephen Reader, Senior Manager of Analytics and Insights at Viacom 2) Compare Mode Secondly, we’ve enabled customers to quickly compare custom sets of Creators, on-the-fly, to visualize historical performance trends. This is particularly useful for checking out your competitive set, hone in on specific date ranges, find peaks and valleys, and dive deeper into the top videos that drove video performance for your competitive landscape. See this in action below.   3) Video and Creator Search Comparisons Finally as part of the New Intelligence, we’ve also made improvements to the search results UI that enable comparisons across any search of videos and creators. Our customers rely on Tubular's measurement of video and creator performance, including metrics of views, engagements, Tubular Video Ratings, and more. With this quick way of generating and comparing metrics side-by-side, video content strategists And when applying granular search and side-by-side metrics comparisons to Tubular's comprehensive video data platform in the market, our customers can efficiently unearth insights to make key video strategy decisions. Becoming a Better Showrunner For those starting off September with questions to hit the ground running in Q4, might we suggest a little Back to School? We are proud to announce our Learning Lab, an interactive educational curriculum with video guidance and tutorials to get a firm grasp on how to make video content decisions for your Q4 strategy (and beyond). Use Learning Lab to grasp key metrics for measuring video performance, explore best practices in video strategy, access guided walkthroughs for using Tubular’s platform and reinforce top use cases to accomplish your video goals. At Tubular, we believe you should spend less time without direction in video and more time producing results with better content. With Tubular Intelligence, you can finally create with confidence. To learn more about Tubular’s Intelligence platform, check out the product features to see how it can help you. We look forward to serving the market’s leading video insights platform. Sincerely, Feng Hong Product Marketing Manager

Tubular DealMaker Launch

Marjaneh Ravai – July 18, 2017

I’m excited to announce the launch of DealMaker! You can read more about it in Variety. Since our founding in 2012, Tubular has helped our customers navigate the complicated and dynamic world of online video. Five years ago, mainstream video was not multi-platform or multi-device, and the goal was largely audience building. Today, the world of online video is vastly different, with 1 Trillion monthly video views, and video being consumed across multiple devices and platforms, and monetizing these views has become an industry priority. Listening to you, our customer, we have noticed an astonishing growth in the rise of and interest in sponsored content. Our publisher customers want to sign more deals, and our brand customers want to effectively plan, run, and report on sponsored video campaigns . Looking at Tubular data, see that sponsored video is projected to get over 24 Billion views in 2017, worth over $1.2 Billion in media value. Today, I am excited to announce the launch of DealMaker, the first and only intelligence product on the market for sponsored content. DealMaker empowers brands and media companies to close more deals, increase ROI, and move their businesses forward together. Tubular’s DealMaker measures over 140,000 sponsored videos, 15,000 brand sponsors, and 15,000 publishers. Brands use DealMaker to find the right media partner for their sponsored video investments and benchmark performance. Media companies use DealMaker to improve their prospecting, pitches, and reporting on sponsored video integrations with brands. In sum, DealMaker takes the guesswork out of forming winning partnerships! I am committed to your success and excited to see you use DealMaker to achieve your partnership goals. Sincerely, Rob Gabel

Tubular Certified in YouTube’s New Measurement Program

Alex Watt – June 23, 2017

Today we're excited to announce our new expanded partnership with YouTube as a founding member of their new YouTube Measurement Program (the "YTMP"). Last August you may recall we announced that we would be working closely with YouTube to launch this new Measurement Partner Program. YouTube’s goal in launching the Measurement Program is to work more closely with measurement companies using the YouTube API Services like Tubular, to ensure high quality methodology, accuracy in calculations and clarity in metric definitions. Tubular has been a long-time partner of YouTube’s in YouTube’s Certified YouTube Partner Program, and we’re now excited to take our partnership to new levels as a founding member of their new Measurement Program. As a YouTube Measurement Partner, all of our YouTube metrics will be officially certified by YouTube. Tubular is one of five YTMP launch partners selected by YouTube, and we will be working closely with YouTube to further grow YouTube metrics and create a measurement standard for the video industry Starting today, you will also see a new YTMP membership badge on our website and products - indicating that all of the YouTube metrics and YouTube data that you see in Tubular is specially certified by YouTube for accuracy and are the best available to you in the industry. We look forward to growing our partnership with YouTube as we continue to provide the industry with the right data and metrics to successfully measure digital video content. Stay tuned for more from our partnership with YouTube, and you can read more about the YTMP from YouTube here.

Your Cheat Sheet for Sales Intelligence

Allison Stern – October 31, 2016

It's no surprise, sponsored video content is on the rise. Viewers love it because content appears organic and is more informative and engaging, and publishers love it because it represents a viable monetization path. Clearly, there is a vast opportunity for brands and content publishers to partner together to create strategic and valuable partnerships. However, a question a lot of content publishers and media companies are faced with is - "where do I start?" and "how do I convey the value of my network to brands?". Tubular can be leveraged as a video intelligence tool to find brands who are investing in sponsored content and also pitch sponsored content partnerships to brands. In this post, we will teach you how to create a data-driven content and distribution strategy to pitch to brands. First things first, let's look at the Tubular Track Dashboard to see how sponsored video is performing on the whole. As we can see, over 275K videos have been uploaded all time, with over 21.5 billion views and 608M engagements - WOAH - it also looks like things really started to heat up in January 2016, with many publishers jumping on the branded content wagon. All-Time Sponsored Video Growth Now let's look at the top performing branded content video in the last month. The Facebook video, "Naples loves Nutella" - published by Insider Travel, garnered the most views with a V30 (first 30-day video views) of 31 million and ER30 (first 30-day video engagement) that is 0.5x more engaging than the average video. This delicious clip features the Italian food mecca Naples, and the various applications of the famous hazelnut-chocolate spread Nutella. Best Performing Sponsored Video - September 2016 So how do you achieve a match made in Nutella heaven? In today's blog post, we'll explore how to leverage Tubular to prove the value of your content and audience to create stellar pitches for brands and advertisers. In this blog post, you'll learn how to: Find Your Story Prospect & Pitch Target & Measure Step One: Find Your Secret Sauce... So, let's kick things off. First, and foremost, it's important that you find your unique story and differentiator and determine what you're number one in - you can be number one in many different metrics or elements, some of which we've outlined below: Views Engagement Category or Topic Rank Campaign Performance Audience Demographic Match Audience Affinity Match It's important to have this data point to effectively pitch yourself out to brands. Now, let's review some interesting ways Tubular customers are already doing this... Here, by looking at Tubular Rankings from August, we can see that The LADbible Group ranked second across global media properties - trumping their competitor UniLad in overall August views. Similarly, BuzzFeed can also highlight that it has 53% more views than The LADbible Group. Top Media Rankings - August 2016 A recent example of highlighting best performance in a category was when Variety featured an article on James Corden's top position in the late-night video category. Using Tubular data, CBS Interactive was able to highlight the success of James Corden's Carpool Karaoke in a press release. The story was picked up by more than 30 publications including USA Today and Billboard. Tubular data continues to be used to verify Carpool Karaoke’s place as a top viral hit. Clearly, we can see from the example below that The Late Late Show with James Corden, occupies the top three position with video 4 and 5 belonging to NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Top 5 Best Performing Late-Night Video Clips Using Tubular, we can also identify audience demographic match and brand affinity. In this example below, we can see that Team Coco's audience demographics skew heavily male, with 85% of its content popular and ripe for pitching to brands that are popular amongst male audiences. You can view audience demographic data in Creator Intelligence, by delving into a specific creator's channel.   Team CoCo Audience Demographic Data In addition to being popular with a male demographic, Team Coco also boasts high affinity amongst gaming franchises Bethesda and Xbox. In this Creator Intelligence example, we can see that Conan's audience is 6.3x more likely to engage with Bethesda, sharing 4.9% in audience overlap. Team Coco Audience Brand Affinity As you can see from the above examples, using these dimensions, there are multiple ways to prove you are number one. At this point, it is important to note that it is difficult to be number one in everything, so be mindful of this when pitching to brands, make sure you are promising them the right metrics, i.e., views, engagement, audience overlap, etc. Another way you can highlight your soapbox status is by showing your performance in a specific category. Whilst Pillsbury may not hold the top spot for brand channels based in the United States, they do hold the top-spot for the food category. Using Creator Intelligence, and the Topic and Country filters, we can view best-performing food brands in the United States - which for September appears to be America's baking-goods favorite, Pillsbury - with over 29.2 million views. Top 3 Performing Food Brands - September 2016 Step Two: Prospect & Pitch... So after you've found your story, the next step is to prospect and pitch to the brands you are targeting. Looking at the "Sponsored Videos" Saved Search in Track Dashboard, you can glean insights into the brands that are investing in sponsored video. For example, searching for a beauty brand for a sponsored, influencer collaboration? With the click-of-a-button, you can view all sponsored videos in Video Intelligence and sort by "Cosmetics" in the Topics filter to see which beauty brands have made recent investments in sponsored video. Looking at the first video featuring beauty influencer, Chloe Boucher we learn that she has featured make-up brands Giorgio Armani and NARS in her make-up tutorial. Sponsored Video Beauty Category Performance - September 2016 Chloe Boucher - September 2016 Here, V30 (first 30-day video views) can also be used as a powerful metric to predict organic view growth. In this example below, we can see that Chloe Boucher's shopping haul video on Zara, Topshop and BT2 has over 72.3K views with a V30 of 70.4K, her content also boasts strong engagement, with 1.3x ER30. Looking at Chloe Boucher's performance at the creator level, we can see that her channel earned 1.2 million views in the month of September and a V30 of 72.8K - which is very similar to the V30 at the video level. "Zara, Topshop & BT2 Haul I Chloe Boucher" Video, V30, Video Intelligence Step Three: Target & Measure... The final piece of the puzzle, after a campaign has run and the collaboration is said and done you should be measuring performance. As a publisher, how do you ensure that you are delivering results to brands and as a brand how do you ensure that you are getting a solid return on your investment? Most recently, major sports teams have expanded their sponsorship opportunities via Facebook. In this example below, we can see a recent video from Papa John's and Major Leauge Baseball (MLB). On every Facebook video that MLB posts of a home run, they have a "handshake" collaboration with Papa John's. Here, MLB can clearly highlight to Papa John's the power of their sponsored campaign in comparison to native content promoted on the Papa John's channel, with 52% more views and content that is 9x more engaging. Side-by-Side Comparison of Native Papa John's Video vs Sponsored MLB Papa John's Video Using a Tubular "Saved Search" in Video Intelligence, we can also send these videos to the Track Dashboard for a side-by-side comparison. Clearly, the sponsored MLB Papa John's collaboration is much more engaging than native Papa John's video content. In this view below, we can see that MLB Papa John’s sponsored campaign which began in June, has already outperformed ALL Papa John’s video content. MLB Papa John's Sponsored Content vs Papa John's Native Video So there you have it! We hope these tips will help you source Tubular data to better inform your sales pitches to advertisers. Remember, we're always here to help customers achieve their online video missions - contact your Customer Success Manager or vipsupport@stagetblrlabs.wpengine.com. You can also browse our Help Center for more info and access our on-demand webinar series.

Seal That Branded Content Deal Using Tubular's Powerful Data and Insights

Caroline Lu – August 29, 2016

Tubular’s Customer Stories blog series highlights unique ways that real customers are using Tubular to win in online video. Here, we share diverse stories of how Tubular fits into the workflows of the industry’s most innovative enterprises - from how brands can identify on-brand influencers to work with, to how media companies leverage Tubular data and insights to create powerful reporting, enable sales teams, inform content strategy and optimize media buying. Previously, we reviewed how a major media company uses Tubular to streamline their internal reporting process. Using Tubular, this media company gathers intel on competitors, tracks trends and top-performing videos, and monitors the growth of their late-night property over time and across platforms. Today, we will focus on compiling the rich data and insights collected using Tubular, and leveraging these robust numbers to bolster sales pitches. In this scenario, a major media company (Unnamed Media Company, or UMC) is pitching a branded content collaboration between a potential advertiser and UMC’s top-performing late-night property: Awesome Late Night. Let’s assume that UMC is targeting Kia Motors Worldwide for their sales pitch. Before Hitting the Road An important first step of this sales pitch is to establish the “why.” The preferred advertising channel for car companies is traditional TV commercials, so why should Kia take a leap of faith and commit to not only marketing on a different medium, but also with a new advertising strategy altogether? With the widespread adoption of DVR, premium OTT services, and even YouTube’s “Skip Ad” feature, traditional advertisements may never even reach the audience that Kia wants to target. Furthermore, even if these commercials do reach potential car-buyers, the “sales pitch” nature of these advertisements may be perceived as off-putting and invasive. Collaborating with a popular media property ensures compelling, quality content tailored to resonate with a very targeted audience. Passive product placements in trusted TV programs or genuine influencer marketing builds credibility. Delivering entertaining content to the right audience maximizes reach and drives brand awareness. This exposure and positive brand sentiment will ultimately mean an uptick in car sales when viewers consider purchasing a new vehicle. Why Awesome Late Night? Now that Kia is convinced to partner with a digital media property, it’s time to communicate Awesome Late Night’s value and show them why this collaboration is mutually beneficial. In short, Awesome Late Night can create an additional business partnership, and Kia can begin to build a trusted digital brand that eventually drives product awareness and sales, thereby maximizing ROI. Research reveals that Kia is marketing its Soul vehicle model towards a younger generation. A Boston.com article claims “Soul’s target audience remains the 18- to 29-year-old Gen Y, an urbanite with a day job, side passion, and love of music and technology.” With this in mind, let’s backtrack to our previous blog post, which explained how to power mission-critical reporting through Tubular. We reviewed UMC’s audience insights and how Tubular provides the distribution of genders and age ranges of those who engage with Awesome Late Night’s YouTube channel: From this, we now have one clear value proposition to offer Kia: Awesome Late Night’s channel audience matches Kia Soul’s target consumer demographic. Through a partnership with Awesome Late Night, Kia can easily reach the 18-34 demographic - close to 81% of the show’s online audience is within this age range. Not to mention that the top audience locations–United States, United Kingdom, Canada– house some of the biggest urban centers in the world. For more context, UMC can use Tubular’s “Industry” filter to access the top brands in the automotive industry, ranked by July views. With the click of a button, UMC has access to a general overview of the Automotive Industry at its fingertips, saving users a lot of time and resources. With Tubular, UMC sees Kia’s strengths (its 30-day views are close to 4x that of the industry average) and weaknesses (its engagement rating is a 0.3x compared to the industry’s average of 1.0x), providing the structure for a tailored pitch. Additionally, UMC can compare Kia to the industry by utilizing the Properties tool: Kia raked in over 1.2 billion views in July across its 74 creators, representing close to 7% of the entire automotive industry’s July views. Presenting facts and insights such as these demonstrates UMC’s deep understanding of Kia’s business, pain points, and goals. UMC can also use Tubular to similarly illustrate a detailed competitive landscape for further depth (for more information on competitive, trend, and growth reporting, check out Part I of this two-part customer story). Next, let’s analyze Awesome Late Night’s profile for comparison: UMC’s sales team can share these impressive numbers with Kia. Awesome Late Night brings in phenomenal monthly views, as witnessed by the nearly 90 million total views generated by its worldwide channel in July. However, Tubular can also help predict campaign viewership through V30, a metric that shows average first 30-day views. In this case, we see that Awesome Late Night drives ~901K views in the first 30 days. Furthermore, ER30 shows the average first-30 day engagement rating, which we can see is above average (an ER30 greater than 1.0x) for Awesome Late Night. Using the same process we did with the Automotive Industry, UMC can compare themselves against the Late Night industry, and spotlight their strengths (see Part I for more details). Combined with Kia’s online video budget and intelligent promotional efforts, the campaign will surely drive both high views and engagement amongst the target audience. Let’s dig a little deeper. With “Audience Also Watches,” UMC is able to show Kia that followers of the late-night brand overlap significantly with those who engage with topics that Kia wants to target. As you can see, Awesome Late Night’s audience is 100x more likely to view channels about political commentary (Talking Points Memo), pop culture programs, movies, and celebrities. To quickly understand the range of channels that Awesome Late Night’s audience is likely to follow, look in the “Categories” filter - you’ll see that most channels appear to relate to Entertainment, Music, Science & Tech, and other topics that resonate with Kia’s target audience. To cross-reference, we could also look at the ‘Themes’ filter above Categories. Whereas Categories are self-selected by creators, Themes are algorithmically derived based on the overall content by the creator. These confirm to Kia that Awesome Late Night’s audiences hold key interests and passions that their ideal buyer shares. Moreover, Awesome Late Night can consult Audience Also Watches when working with Kia’s budget to specifically target these channels’ audiences when promoting the campaign. Now that UMC has determined that their late-night audience indeed matches Kia’s target customer, it’s time to brainstorm a winning campaign idea. To do so, let’s review the top content of the year from Kia: Interestingly, Kia’s top two videos from the past year have been a content collaboration with X-Men and Rafael Nadal, lending further credibility to the idea that cinematic, branded content is better received by their audiences than traditional ads. Looking at Kia’s top-performing traditional commercial, for example, we can see that it has less views in one year than the top branded content videos received in 30 days. Its engagement is also lower than that of the branded pieces. Another reason to shift marketing budget towards branded video content! Finally, let’s check out the top digital content from 2016 from all late-night shows, cross-platform: With the click of a button in Tubular, UMC has now discovered that in 2016, the most popular and most viewed videos from late-night hosts involve singing and lip-syncing. Of course, Awesome Late Night would have to creatively brainstorm a branded content campaign that incorporates Kia Soul organically and that closely embraces shared values. Armed with the content and audience insights that Tubular was able to provide, UMC and Awesome Late Night now have strong ammunition to deliver Kia a winning sales pitch. Post-Campaign Boom! Kia’s completely convinced that not only is branded content the way to go, but also Awesome Late Night is the best partner for this deal. Kia joins forces with Awesome Late Night, and brainstorms and executes a brilliant campaign. Let’s fast-forward to the end of the campaign. What now? Post campaign, UMC can also glean insights from Tubular and quickly report on the performance of the branded content campaign, including cross platform metrics such as views, engagement and social reach. UMC can gather data-driven successes - the top-performing videos from the campaign, as well as more granular data such as the exact days and videos that spiked. All of this valuable information serves as a benchmark for both Kia and Awesome Late Night for future campaigns. Mission accomplished!

Lad Content Unseats Tasty in July 2016 Cross-platform Rankings

Caroline Lu – August 17, 2016

It's time to reveal the most watched online video publishers of July 2016! Every month, Tubular’s Rankings Center showcases the top cross-platform video publishers, as well as platform-specific and category-specific brands and creators, including Media, Automotive and Beauty properties. Additionally, watch our co-founder Allison Stern elaborate on exclusive Rankings insights in this Facebook video. Key takeaways from July 2016: For the first time, since November 2015, Buzzfeed’s Tasty has been unseated from its #1 spot in cross-platform rankings. UK entertainment content publishers, UNILAD and The LADbible came in at #1 and #2 spots with 2.7 Billion views and 2.3 Billion views respectively, followed by Tasty at #3 with 1.7 Billion views. The top 100 video brands and creators together generated 48.5 Billion total cross-platform views in July, representing a 20% increase over June view numbers. In the Facebook Publishers rankings, UNILAD, which had views of 2.6 Billion, took the #1 spot. Following closely behind was The LADbible at #2 with 2.1 Billion views. Tasty ranked #3 with 1.7 Billion views followed by NowThis and Tastemade, which took the #4 and #5 spots respectively. Links to Tubular July Rankings http://tubularlabs.com/rank/cross-platform/ http://tubularlabs.com/rank/youtube/ http://tubularlabs.com/rank/facebook-publishers/ http://tubularlabs.com/rank/facebook-personalities/ http://tubularlabs.com/rank/vine/ http://tubularlabs.com/rank/instagram/ http://tubularlabs.com/rank/brands/ https://tubularlabs.com/rank/automotive/ https://tubularlabs.com/rank/media/ https://tubularlabs.com/rank/beauty/ Monthly rankings of top 25 online video creators and brands from April 2015 - June 2016 are available upon request. To learn more or inquire about custom rankings: Request a demo of Tubular Video Intelligence

Tubular and YouTube's Measurement Program

Caroline Lu – August 11, 2016

Today, YouTube announced their upcoming YouTube Measurement Program to help participants provide accurate, consistent and relevant YouTube measurement data to their clients and users. We at Tubular are very excited to work with YouTube on the development of this program and to continue to evolve standardized and platform-specific metrics for our emerging online video industry. We’re all living through a once-in-a-generation shift in video from linear TV to internet-enabled video. Tubular estimates that there are over 10,000 independent creators who make a living in online video; 66,000 media companies and brands generate 111 billion views/month; and over 3 million new videos are uploaded to the public every day. However, third party measurement systems weren’t designed for the scale and pace of online video, and so third party standards are now emerging from new providers, such as Tubular. As the online video industry matures and speeds towards 1 trillion video views per month and billions of dollars shift towards online video ads and sponsored integrations, it’s time for us as an industry to get serious about third party measurement. Creators, media companies, brands, and agencies all use data today to make more informed decisions on how to spend their time and money in pursuit of larger, more engaged audiences. But, with the proliferations of platforms and their reporting capabilities, they have trouble keeping up and making sense of it all. With Tubular Video Ratings, Tubular has a shared goal with YouTube of making the complex online video ecosystem easier to navigate with accurate and consistent metrics to help creators, brands, agencies, and publishers make sense of performance metrics and make informed marketing, production, and sales decisions on video platforms like YouTube. Since we created Tubular Video Ratings, Tubular users have been able to leverage simple, consistent metrics for each platform, and compare performance of content uploaded at different times. Tubular Video Ratings were built because we heard an industry need for a standard way to evaluate content performance on and across platforms, across time. However, the definition of a view differs by platform (autoplay or click-to-play), making it challenging to aggregate and compare Tubular Video Ratings for a creator, brand or property across platforms. For example, BuzzFeed Video’s video below has been posted on multiple platforms, and it’s challenging to aggregate the total views that the video has received across different platforms because of differences in platform view definitions: With the Measurement Program, YouTube will work with measurement companies to ensure high quality methodology, accuracy in calculations, clarity in metric definitions and best practice around user data protection. We think that YouTube’s announcement of their Measurement Program today is just the start, and we look forward to working with YouTube as we continue to evolve Tubular Video Ratings to help equip the industry with the right data and metrics to successfully measure on digital video content. We’re excited to support the YouTube Measurement Program and for YouTube to launch this program later this year!

How a TV Show Can Leverage Tubular Data for Powerful Reporting

Caroline Lu – August 5, 2016