Visible Measures Launches New Site To Show The “True Reach” Of A Video Campaign

It’s easy to tell when a video has been successful online, right? Just go to YouTube and look at how many views it has.

Except YouTube isn’t the only site around (as I remind myself anytime I look at the view counts on TechCrunch’s YouTube channel). That’s why Visible Measures, a startup focused on video analytics and advertising, has launched a new site called True Reach, bringing viewing data together from across the web.

The data displayed on True Reach is pretty straightforward — it shows you a bunch of videos and their total viewership across what it says are hundreds of video sites, including YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and AOL (which owns TechCrunch). If you click on a video, you’ll not only be able to see it play, but also view the number of sites and clips (Visible Measures and True Reach is more interested in the success of an entire video campaign rather than an individual video) being counted.

CEO Brian Shin compared this to “the total box office” of a video, whereas looking at YouTube is “just one big theater chain.” For example, his team pointed me to Land Rover’s video promoting the new Range Rover Sport, which has around 503,000 views on YouTube, compared to a True Reach of about 6.2 million. Less dramatic but still significant — Jean-Claude Van Damme’s epic split video for Volvo 77.3 million views on YouTube, and a True Reach of nearly 140 million

Shin also said that while True Reach is focused on marketing campaigns, it’s not limited to Visible Measures clients.

But if someone isn’t a client, I wondered about how accurate the technology could be at determining that two different videos on two different sites are part of the same campaign. He replied that the data collection is largely tech driven and “extremely technically scalable,” but there are also humans checking the results.

The information on True Reach is available for free. Presumably, Shin is hoping that it’ll lure some visitors into becoming Visible Measures customers. Last year, he suggested that the company had been “a little closed” and unknown to anyone who wasn’t a customer, and this seems like a smart step to reverse that.