Startup Profile: Divinity Metrics

Who: Divinity Metrics, which gathers and measures the consumption habits of online media consumers, has been bootstrapped by CEO Rajeev Kadam and his team. They’re currently raising money.

Why: Divinity Metrics provides analytics to advertising agencies, television networks, and music labels about where some 2 million of their assets are being downloaded and viewed on BitTorrent and, as of this week, YouTube.

What: The company looks at IP addresses and other data to figure out where content is popular. Unlike competing analytics companies such as Vidmetrix and TubeMogul, which help publishers measure their distribution across multiple sites, or Visible Measures, which helps customers (including site owners) measure users’ interaction with video, Divinity Metrics provides a high-level view of where content is being consumed, regardless of whether or not it’s the official version.

Once it is given the name of a show — say, Entourage, for example — the company finds all the various pirated and non-pirated clips of it and determines who is consuming them. Armed with that data, its customers can make better bets on new markets for promotion and syndication. The nitty-gritty of what Divinity Metrics does is probably most comparable to security firms who patrol BitTorrent and YouTube for infringers — and that’s actually what the company used to do, before its customers said they’d rather pay for the data as a marketing tool.

Where: Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. Sells its services online.

When: Founded in 2005; originally called Divinity Assets.