Tubular Labs Debuts New Industry-Standard Viewership Metrics For Digital Video

Analytics firm Tubular Labs has rolled out a new set of audience measurement metrics that are intended to serve as a standard across the digital video industry.

The Tubular Audience Ratings are “the first and only deduplicated audience and time-based system for measuring video attention across social media platforms,” the firm says.

Basically, the metrics accommodate for the likelihood that some viewers will watch videos multiple times, on different platforms. They also calculate the total watch time a video receives and the average time each viewer spends watching, down to the second. For now, Tubular can use them to generate measurements for content on YouTube and Facebook; it has plans to add Twitter and Instagram.

This new system has been in development since early 2019. To create it, Tubular Labs formed the Global Video Measurement Alliance (GVMA), a coalition of major media and entertainment companies including Vice, BuzzFeed, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Mattel, Group Nine Media, Ellen Digital Network, Corus Entertainment, Brut, Freeda Media, and Social Chain Media.

The GVMA’s collective goal was to encourage broad adoption of viewership metrics that are generally used to measure the performance of television programs. When the coalition was founded, there was no agreed-upon industry standard for digital video measurement. Measuring performance in views is most common, but social platforms, ad agencies, and other entities tend to each have their own way of calculating views, which can lead to discrepancies.

“[U]nified time-based metrics eliminate the need to be totally reliant on disparate view count criteria provided by social platforms,” Tubular says. “This enables content producers and advertisers to make better investment decisions and develop video partnerships based on audience retention.”

Tubular Audience Ratings “bring parity to the convergent TV arena where media owners and brands need to measure TV and digital alike,” former BuzzFeed president and current Tubular Labs executive chairman Greg Coleman added in a statement.

You can see more about the metrics here.