Visible Measures Now Tracking Videos At MySpace

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Video tracking startup Visible Measures signed up MySpace as a customer to measure more deeply how consumers are watching and spreading videos from the site. MySpace is the Web’s No. 2 video site, although it is still only one tenth the size of YouTube in terms of videos streamed. Visible Measures, which raised $10 million in March in a series C funding, also counts Viacom and MTV Networks as another big customer.

Like every other video site, MySpace is increasing the amount of professionally-produced premium videos because those are more appealing to advertisers. It sees the user-generated videos (UGC) more as a communication feature for MySpace members. MySpace’s video VP Jason Kirk tells me:

We have seen big increases in premium intent viewing over UGC. Premium content views probably close to doubled in the last year. USG video is part of the social network part of our site.

With Visible Measures, MySpace will be able to track consumer engagement at a more granular level. And, more importantly, it can give all of its video partners a self-serve dashboard to track their own videos. For instance, they will be able to see how many times a particular video is watched 10 percent through, 60 percent through, or all the way through. Visible Measures also tracks views as they spread across the Web and can show spikes based on what other sites pick up a particular video.

Visible Measures CEO Brian Shin was surprised the amount of premium video content available on MySpace and the engagement levels he’s seen so far. According to him, the average viewing time per session on MySpace is 10 minutes, with the average viewer watching four videos per session. He says that is “twice the norm” for comparable videos on other sites. In contrast, Comscore’s VideoMetrix, which doesn’t directly measure each video but is rather an estimate based on a panel, shows only 11.3 minutes watched per viewer per month for Fox Interactive as a whole.