I sincerely apologize if I offended anyone by using the word retarded in the title of this post, but get ready because I’m going to use it again. There’s no other way to express how ridiculous it is that the video site community is so far off in standardizing their metric for view counts. It’s straight up retarded and needs to be fixed.

Disparate video view count metrics is part of an overall problem of non-standard web analytics which ultimately stunts the economics of web content.

If Comscore reports one set of numbers, Compete another, Alexa another, Google analytics another and your internal analytics tells you something altogether different, we have a problem. Not to mention it’s a not-so-well-kept secret that if you’re a paying Comscore subscriber your numbers will trend favorably, but if you’re not then you may not even show up in their reports. IT heads have tried to explain the technological variables for traffic accounting, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating. Sessions, server calls and cookies are all defined and managed differently. It’s the wild west and it’s come to the point where a sheriff needs to step in and clean up Metricville. Until that happens, advertisers, content producers and viewers will remain in the dark in terms of understanding what is popular, what is worth buying and what is worth creating.

A Tube Mogul report entitled “What Counts as a View” from last June states that video sites like Youtube, Revver, Yahoo and Metacafe to name a few all have different methodolgies in counting views. As much as that shouldn’t surprise anyone, it’s pretty disturbing. As they conclude:

This lack of standardization presents complexity to content producers and advertisers in understanding the relative popularity of videos across video sites. To fully realize the potential of advertising models in the online video medium, increased standardization and transparency is required.

They report (see chart) that some sites are more stringent (Youtube) and some are less (Revver), but the bottom line is that they’re not agreeing on what makes a view count. Does it matter if the video is only partially watched? What if it’s embedded or refreshed?

Tube Mogul is a legit company run by smart folks like Brett Wilson up in Berkeley. I pinged them and asked what was up. They said in an email that they did the study last June from one computer and one IP address. They’re planning on redoing it again next month to see what’s changed.

Tracking at movies studios isn’t perfect, but at least all studios look at the same tracking data from the top two research companies. TV rating info is notoriously inaccurate, but at least it’s one reporting company, Nielsen, that maintains its inaccurate data. My point is that at least there’s a relative scale to project against for FIlm and TV, but web is all over the place and it’s retarded.

The bottom line is that the promise of the web, that it’s the most efficient way to see ROI for advertisers because it’s the media platform that is most trackable in terms of user interaction, will never come to fruition if the standards for measuring that interaction remain unaligned. Someone needs to step up and get that fixed. Any volunteers?