2009: The Epoch of Extended Web Content
Once upon a time, accessing content on the Web required the digital consumer to be tethered to their desktop computer, which was in turn attached to a phone line that enabled access to the Internet at blazing 56K speeds. The web-accessing Neanderthal soon became more upright with the widespread availability of broadband access. Later, mobility was generally available – we could access the Internet from different access points (home, work, coffee shop, library, airport) without the burden of wires connected to our computers (a luxury I enjoy while writing this post on my laptop, connected to the Internet through a wireless router). And of course, now the digital consumer can access the Internet from nearly anywhere through their iPhone, Blackberry, or other web-enabled mobile device.
Just as the digital consumer has become increasingly mobile, so too has the content we consume. A web landscape that once required people to go to specific web destinations for content has evolved to one in which content is pushed to consumers, where and how they want to consume it. Starting with RSS feeds and customizable home pages, web content has grown legs and is finding its way around the web.
This dynamic was pioneered by, and is commonplace among, Web 2.0 leaders such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. YouTube, for example, gives users access to easy-to-use tools to embed a video in their customizable home page or Facebook or MySpace profile page. Additionally, the introduction and rapid mainstream usage of widgets, gadgets and other social media applications, all of which allow consumers to get access to a publisher’s content away from that publisher’s site, has exploded over the last 24 months. Facebook has built an entire ecosystem around the idea of their site being a platform for other publishers and application developers to make content available to their users. Publishers face the reality that there can be more consumers of their content off their site than on their site.
As this complex ecosystem rapidly evolved, we at Comscore have had to move quickly to provide the critical 3rd-party services that measure consumer engagement with publishers’ content wherever it occurs. It is essential that the many emerging media formats are able to prove their value to advertisers in reaching their desired consumers. For example, since our initial release of the Comscore Video Metrix service in 2006, we’ve had to measure the viral nature of video as it is distributed and viewed across the web. Most importantly for video monetization, one needs to properly attribute credit to the publisher that serves the video. So, in the case of a consumer watching an embedded YouTube video on MySpace, it’s important to give proper credit to YouTube for the view. Similarly, a video that is watched on a portal through the Hulu player is attributed to Hulu. (Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, recently commented that Hulu content is embedded into over 60,000 Web sites, including MySpace.)
Additionally, as Comscore’s video measurement evolves with the use of server-side tagging for enhanced measurement and classification, we will be able to introduce reporting views that account for the distributor, as well as the content creator and the partner site where it was watched.
The more recent forms of portable content - widgets and social media applications - have exploded in their reach over the last 18 months. Our data show that more than 75 percent of U.S. Internet users have viewed a widget or social media application. Social networking sites are prime places for distribution of content in easy, bite sized pieces, through such applications. A new wave of media companies, such as Slide, RockYou, iLike and WaterCooler, have stormed onto the scene as a result of Facebook and other social media sites opening their platform to distributed content. With the initial launch of Comscore’s Widget Metrix service in mid-2007 – which subsequently evolved into our Extended Web reporting just last month, we have been able to provide media buyers with a view into the consumer uptake for these new media formats and media publishers with new ways to demonstrate their incremental reach with these vehicles.
We enter 2009 with little doubt that distributed content will continue to grow as consumers get more sophisticated in their media consumption habits and demand content in more portable formats. At Comscore, we look forward to measuring what we expect to be an increasing mobile consumer interaction with increasingly portable content. We would be interested to hear how your organization is enabling one or both of these market dynamics.