WatchMojo.com did 8M video streams in Q1, 2008, with a whopping 4.5M coming in March alone. Here’s the press release.

Curiously, I have no idea where that would put us amongst other content creators. There are a lot of figures and sources for aggregators, but not many (any?) for content owners.  It’s a shame, and I smell a market opportunity for someone.

Anyway, judging by comScore’s latest figures, a property needs 67M streams to crack the Top 10.

I spoke to Andrew Lipsman, Senior Manager of Industry Analysis at comScore who gave me a breakdown of what it would take to crack the Top 25, 50 and 100 ranks. Using comScore’s USA Home, work and university panel:

- To crack the Top 25, you would need 20M streams
- To crack the Top 50, you would need 7.5M streams
- To crack the Top 100, you would need 1.5M streams

What would 5M streams get you, you ask? About 70th. Here’s the problem, most of the sites in the Top 100 are aggregators, and few, if any, have any exclusive content (let alone own the content).

Hulu for example is getting good feedback and seeing nice traction, but it does not have proprietary content; as an aggregator, it’s possible to scale quickly. We’re certainly in scale mode now, all our graphs are pointing upwards and what not, but admittedly, content takes time to scale… but once a content creator scales, it becomes an immovable force in the landscape. We’re freaking everywhere, including YouTube.

Speaking of YouTube, it’s not surprising to see that YouTube is king, sure, but it would be very interesting to see which content creators generate the most amount of streams across many sites.

As a content producer, I am most interested about that.  Naturally everyone will want one metric or another, for example ABC’s digital chief Albert Cheng stresses user time spent watching videos over streams. For a traditional media company like ABC, I see his point. While our content is formatted very differently than ABC’s, I would like that figure too, especially when you consider how our library stacks up:

- 12 categories: Automotive, Education, Fashion, Film, Food, Health, Music, Politics & Economy, Space & Science, Sports, Technology and Travel
- 30 or so subcategories.
- 3500 videos published, 4000 in all including pipeline, 5000 including all unedited material
- 500 hours of filmed material
- 100 to 200 hours of programming
- Average length: 1 to 3 minutes.
- 99% is in English, with 1% being in French and Spanish, with plans for content in German, Mandarin, etc.

Not only was March a record month for WatchMojo.com, but we’ve set a new record every month since we began to track cumulative monthly streams across our network.

Advertising vs. Content

This is an important thing to consider: as video advertising formats face obstacles to scale, the line between advertising and content will blur increasingly. I am NOT saying that content will become advertising, but a lot of advertising will look like content. With proper disclosure and targeted to the right audience and in the right state of mind, it can work.

As such, tracking which companies that produce or own content that generate the most amount of streams is going to become very important.

Analyze This: Need for More Video Analytics

Last week Google unveiled YouTube Analytics to allow content owners who use YouTube determine where the streams are coming from. That’s a nice addition, but in a hyper-distribution world where media has legs and everything is embeddable, it would be excellent to get a kind of web-wide analytics tool where you can see the top content creators, too.

I thought of this when New Tee Vee’s Liz Gannes questioned the wisdom of Yahoo! not disclosing stats for Yahoo!’s now defunct The 9 show: “Neeraj Khemlani, Yahoo’s head of programming, would not disclose The 9’s audience size — a move that seems silly in this day and age. ” I asked what she meant by that last part, she said:
“Most video viewer stats are public by default — why withdraw yourself from that comparison?”

She’s right, but what is not public by default are views for an entire producer, or network, or company across the Web.

In fact, I expect players like TubeMogul or the recently-acquired Vidmetrix to come up with such data… but that would require the underlying sites (YouTube, Veoh, Revver, etc.) to let them publish that data.

I sometimes hope that Google would make its Analytics data public… but I doubt that will happen because not all publishers would allow that.  However, since YouTube, Veoh and Revver etc. already publish individual video views… but not something like total views by producers.  I think advertisers would really want to see that.

Lord knows I would welcome it, because we would be high atop that list.

Anyway, it’s been a fantastic first quarter, we look forward to building on it.  Here’s the press release, again.

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