TubeMogul Gets Embedded in Players Around the Web

If you want to analyze when and where people are watching video that’s distributed across the web, you have a few options. You could use a panel like the big measurement companies, which estimate overall trends and don’t drill down to individual streams. You could use internal data supplied by sites, whose metrics are all different. (They don’t even agree on what counts as a video view!) Or you could get a bug embedded directly into each site’s video player to keep an eye on what happens within.

But when you’re starting out in the business, you can’t just approach video publishers and sites and get them to incorporate your little line of code. It’s only now, after TubeMogul has amassed 85,000 users for its video syndication and measurement services, that it has been able to convince 15 different video sites to support its analytics platform. Those sites are: Brightcove, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, blip.tv, Break.com, Howcast, eBaum’s World, Graspr, GrindTV, Sclipo, Webcastr, Viddler, 5min, Streetfire.net and Sevenload. TubeMogul’s analytics include standardized per-second audience dropoff, referral sites and terms and geography.

This is a significant step forward for original online video creators, who are TubeMogul’s main constituency. Metrics from the new platform will be available to all TubeMogul users, including those who use the free version of the service. Though TubeMogul 2.0 won’t generate new revenue, it does give the Emeryville, Calif.-based company an edge over competitors. Video portals can only incorporate so many little lines of code into their players before they get bloated and buggy.

However, a big weakness of the TubeMogul system is it does not include YouTube, by far the largest video host. TubeMogul uses data from its partnership with Attributor to estimate YouTube viewership, demographics and pirated views. TubeMogul also doesn’t measure Hulu — which doesn’t break out per-show analytics — or any of the other TV network sites.