What counts as a video view?

TubeMogul released an interesting study on what counts as a video view. This question is very important for all video producers out there who sell video views to sponsors, or for advertisers trying to optimize their marketing budgets.

The study results are pretty bold. Basically, a view is counted as soon as a video launches. To the exception of Blip.tv and Metacafe, all video platforms do not count views according to the IP address. said in other words, as soon as a video launches, it is counted as a view.

So no IP address discrimination or length discrimination. Interestingly enough, the study also finds that Youtube and Yahoo! became more loose concerning views since last year when the first version of this study was released. This shows that video platforms are after video views to grow their numbers and remain competitive. For video producers, that's a good thing as it inflates video views. For advertisers placing their ads on videos, that's a bad thing, as they pay for videos that might not have played for more than 2 seconds.

That's exactly where video platforms are playing the hypocrisy game by not developing or offering analytics tools to know just how much of the video is seen by the user who launches it. This way, video views numbers just keep growing, and the online video market keeps showing incredible growth numbers.