How Happy Are Your Viewers?

Metrics such as demographics, geography, engagement and location provide insights that help publishers better target viewers and better monetize their content.

 

Alone, each measurement is helpful and useful. But taken together, new questions quickly arise. Are there new ways to integrate all these data sets? What do these signals mean for both viewers and media publishers? 

 

What if we could aggregate this data to define a new measurement for viewer satisfaction?

 

This has led to me think of an entirely new metric, one that provides a holistic view to advertisers and publishers both: the viewer happiness index.

 

Based on my experiences as a content consumer, here are the five qualities I see as key to viewer happiness:

 

1. Content that I like

2. Relevant ads that aren't the annoying, disrespectful or distasteful

3. High streaming quality

4. Content that is relevant to the time of day

5. Content that is relevant to the device type

 

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but a preliminary one to start with. Today, there doesn't exist a single piece of technology that can control all five of these attributes. Instead companies are working on individual pieces of this puzzle, such as encoding, ad targeting, recommendation engines and the like. 

 

If one of those five qualities isn't right, it impacts viewer satisfaction and ultimately decreases viewer happiness. Whenever I watch NBA games with my four-year-old son, there are always, always ads for violent video games or scantily clad women in beer commercials. Advertisers cater their messaging to the basketball-viewing demographic (composed largely of men who like video games, women and beer). Yet if a device knew that evenings are family time, it could personalize the experience based on what it knows about my household. That would significantly increase our engagement during commercial breaks, compared with the status quo, which is me skipping through ads.

 

As it stands, there's no such viewer happiness index at the moment. 

 

But we have the tools to make it possible to personalize the viewing experience and improve viewer sentiment (not to mention optimize monetization strategies). 

 

Right now, the main metric advertisers are concerned with is whether people are watching their content. But if advertisers could target viewers who fall within a certain happiness score range, there's a potential to create a new business model where higher ad rates deliver targeted messages to happier consumers. 

 

The ability of real time video analytics to deliver targeted, relevant media to viewers on all screens means that gauging viewer sentiment, and monetizing based on viewer happiness, is a real possibility in the near future.