Until Internet video companies can provide advertisers with hard evidence of just who is watching what online, they shouldn't expect a windfall of new advertising dollars siphoning away from television networks and onto the Web.
That was the message http://blip.tv/ co-founder and chief operating officer Dina Kaplan had for those gathered at the mesh conference in Toronto on Wednesday.
“It's not sexy, but it's what we have to do,” she said in an interview after appearing on a panel discussing the future of digital video.
“One of the most important things that has to happen is we have got to be able to give our advertisers better information than what we have right now on who is watching Web video and how they are watching,” she said.
Observers have long prognosticated that as video-on-demand sites such as hulu.com, jumptv.com and Ms. Kaplan's blip.tv become more popular and draw larger numbers of viewers, advertising dollars traditionally earmarked for television programs will begin to bleed onto the Internet.
Sites such as Google and Yahoo have shown that advertisers are willing to move some of their marketing budgets online via search and display ads, but television remains the largest advertising medium and in-video ads are still a nascent business.
If more of those billions of television marking dollars are to migrate online, advertisers need to predict the return on their investment. Although websites are currently capable of tracking how many times users click on a particular video, determining how many of those viewers actually watch the whole clip or pay attention to whatever advertising is associated with it, is significantly more difficult.
Advertisers want to know how many seconds of a video someone watches, how many episodes in an online series someone viewed and how many videos they checked out in a given session, Ms. Kaplan said.
“Until we have that information, you can almost say we don't deserve to have more money,” she said. “We look forward to pushing the envelope on getting more and better stats to give back to advertisers so that we can support more advertising on Web video.”
Although television ratings are measured by Neilsen and ComScore Inc. can measure how many Internet users visit a certain site, there is no standard source that specializes in tracking online video-watching habits.
Such a standard would prove to be a boon for the entire online video industry, Ms. Kaplan said. Currently her company is in negotiations with three different firms that track this kind of data; she's hoping one of those groups emerges as the yardstick for online video.
Unlike YouTube, which is dominated by user-generated viral videos, mash-ups and other short clips, New York-based blip.tv is focused on independent, episodic shows, much like a television network.
Producers ranging from documentary creators to comedy troupes are encouraged to upload their shows to blip.tv, which in turn helps to promote the videos; if a show ends up getting sponsored by an advertiser, blip.tv splits the revenue with the producers.
For many independent producers looking to build an audience online, blip.tv and other similar sites represent the first step to replicating the same process of success which led to the careers of musical acts such as rapper Chamillionaire and Brit-pop rockers The Arctic Monkeys.
Those artists and numerous others used the Internet to create a large fan base before ever even approaching a major label for a record deal. The same thing is possible for independent video producers Ms. Kaplan said.
“I think we'll see this happening in video where we see a show creator build up a pretty big audience online and possibly even have a relationship with an advertiser because of that audience and then go to a network,” she said.
“At that point, the network might need them more than they need the network,” she said.
However, as the Web continues to evolve and it becomes easier for consumers to watch Internet videos on their television while sitting on their couch, some producers may opt to forego television networks entirely.
“On the web they will have all the intellectual property rights that they want,” she said. “They will also probably have a more favourable advertising revenue share, so they'll hold all the cards.”
