Finally real iTunes metrics, free via Google Analytics
I founded VoloMedia in 2005 to bring Analytics and Advertising technology to episodic media delivery, “Podcasting”. As the years have rolled by, Podcasting has grown from user generated audio to professionally produced video, from mainly an audio iPod media, to consumption on a variety of screens – increasingly the iPhone. VoloMedia has had tremendous success signing up many of the major TV shows as customers – ABC, NBC, G4TV, How Stuff Works, etc. Today we manage over 45 million monthly media requests, 75% of which is video and the volumes are growing, we had nearly 2 million media requests yesterday. With all of these downloads over all of these years, one fact has remained stubborn -a vast majority of the traffic originates from Apple’s iTunes Media player. This should not be very surprising given that the iTunes store hosts 140,000 podcast feeds – and this is where most consumers are discovering podcast shows.
I helped ADM standardize the measurement specs around downloads, and the process was contentious around the metrics question, “download requests” or “completed downloads”? The most final of all metrics , “plays”, was not considered because it simply was not feasible. During the current economic downturn, the need for the best metrics has become even more important for publishers and advertisers.
Over a year ago our engineers decided to resolve this issue in the most practical way we could – connecting iTunes to Google Analytics. We are announcing this product today. Before I go into the specifics, I would like to emphasize one important point – this free service does not require any relationship, contractual or otherwise, with VoloMedia.
VoloMedia’s Bridge-to-Google Analytics is a plug-in to the iTunes Media player, now installed with over 100 thousand iTunes consumers in the US – precisely 94,296 iTunes plug-ins were active over the last 5 days. Publishers are free to use this free service if it meets their needs, i.e. collect annonymous usage statistics regarding usage of their content on iTunes and to analyze them using Google Analyics: a free and robust industry-standard platform. If you have ever used Google Analytics, then you are familiar with “GA_ID – Google Analytics ID”. With a simple modification of the RSS feed to incorporate the GA-ID the publisher can start flowing aggregated play and download data to their Google Analytics account. More information is on our website: http://www.volomedia.com
Welcome to “Get the Download” from the Association for Downloadable Media.
Colette practices intellectual property law specializing in technology and new media. She represents a range of business, non-profit organizations and individual clients addressing copyright, trademark, privacy, reputation, and security issues. She speaks and writes regularly on issues related to intellectual property, on-line reputation, and the Internet. She holds a non-residential fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society and has been featured on numerous on-line programs including the New York Times Tech Talk, CNET Live, and This Week In Law. She is an Editorial Advisory Board member of the Journal for Internet Law, the California Lawyer magazine, and The Conversations Network, and a Board member of INFORUM, a division of the Commonwealth Club of California. She is also a contributing author to the forthcoming 2009 Broadcasting Legal Guide published by the National Association of Broadcasters.
I credit Tim with helping me better understand the evolutionary cycle of online video, specifically in terms of how new technologies get folded into the mix. While munching happily on salads at a Burbank eatery, Tim and I spoke at length about the state of online video today. In particular we spent time discussing not just the basic challenge of monetizing but the bigger issue of how today’s content creators need to view their work in order to be successful.
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