BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Visible Measures, the leader in social video measurement and activation, today announced the results of a comprehensive study comparing the Engaged Viewing Time™ of major social video platforms including Facebook and YouTube. Because so many video platforms provide video view counts, but define “views” differently, taking into account the True Reach (total views across platforms) combined with the Engaged Viewing Time of a video ad campaign across channels is critical. This study determined that YouTube generates an average viewing time of branded video advertising campaigns almost four times (3.6x) longer than Facebook. Visible Measures looked at video engagement data representing more than 37 million views across both platforms.
In today’s ecosystem, a “view” on each platform is measured and reported differently across the board. These varying metrics put marketers at a disadvantage since there is no standardized measurement on attention across all major platforms to help increase their ROI, and maximize their Share of Attention™.
Each video platform uniquely defines what constitutes as a view on their platform, leaving brands and marketers in the dark when they try to measure campaign success. For example, Facebook registers a view after three seconds of viewing time while YouTube’s TrueView ad product registers a view after 30 seconds of viewing time (or the duration of the video if it is shorter than 30 seconds). In other words, a YouTube view can represent ten times the viewing time of a Facebook view.
Some of the key findings behind Visible Measures research into Engaged Viewing Time include:
- On Facebook, a typical viewing experience is a video starting to play automatically as the user scrolls past it in their News Feed. On YouTube a video ad is likely to play in front of video content the user chose to watch, often with the option to skip the ad after five seconds.
- The longer a video is on YouTube, the more time consumers are likely to spend engaging with it, even watching two or more minutes of the video. In contrast, Facebook users are unlikely to spend more than 30 seconds watching content of any length.
- If a brand’s audience is watching two minutes of their content on YouTube on average while only watching 15 seconds of the brand’s competitor’s content on Facebook, the brand’s one million YouTube views would translate into two million minutes of engaged viewing time while the competitor’s two million Facebook views would only represent half a million minutes. With half the views, the brand could still see 4X the Engaged Viewing Time.
“Measuring the hours of viewing time that specific campaigns receive on different platforms allows an enhanced comparison of campaigns, beyond just looking at the view count,” said Brian Shin, CEO of Visible Measures. “This is a critical metric for brands and marketers, as it provides insight into the value a brand will get on each platform and accurately benchmark their performance against competitors. Views alone do not provide a fair comparison anymore.”
To calculate the data behind Engaged Viewing Time, Visible Measures analyzed viewership data from thousands of campaigns on Facebook and YouTube and created platform-specific algorithms that allow the company to estimate viewing time for every video asset on those platforms.
The full report on the Engaged Viewing Time of YouTube versus Facebook can be found at http://www.visiblemeasures.com/2016/09/16/engaged-viewing-time/.
About Visible Measures
Visible Measures, the leader in social video measurement and activation, enables brands to better compete for consumer engagement by maximizing their Share of Attention relative to media spend in video content advertising. The company’s platform is fueled by a massive proprietary dataset, as well as patented programmatic technology that combines five trillion data points to reach more than 500 million unique monthly users across 600,000 web and mobile properties. World class advertisers and brands successfully rely on Visible Measures’ video content advertising platform every day to drive unmatched consumer engagement worldwide. Visit us online at www.visiblemeasures.com or follow us on Twitter @visiblemeasures.
True Reach and Visible Measures and the Visible Measures logo are registered marks owned by Visible Measures Corp. Other company and product names may be trademarks or servicemarks of their respective owners.
