Congrats to Next New Networks on reaching a Billion views, that’s quite a few views! We just went through the exercise of putting together stats on views served here at Rocketboom and couldn’t get to an exact #. Greg spent a couple of weeks on past logs, we interpolated a bit on some early data, and when we came up with a general range, we decided to go ahead and pick the lowest number of the low end of the range just to be confident, and set our markers.
Rocketboom has served over 125 Million videos views to date.
One thing that’s important to remember about video views is that they are becoming less and less of an indicator of how well your media is doing. While we have never bought a single view, it’s common place for companies to buy views, and this essentially hacks the system in a negative way for everyone. 100k views for only $189 is a pretty good deal. Another common view inflation trick occurs when companies buy banner ad traffic for pennies, which drives traffic to video ads that sell for dollars. It’s a lot like Twitter where you can often see the scams more transparently, and the value of the content and the audience is not really of concern. The web is infested with spam accounts that are created for the sole intent of manufacturing traffic.
I used to blog regularly about Rocketboom updates, and market updates, and then it kinda fell by the wayside as the company has grown and I’ve just gotten busier and busier, a typical excuse. While the world has certainly changed over the last several years with regards to more audiences and more predictable content online, surprisingly, the market is still developing rather slowly and it’s often much more deformed than it appears – I’ll try to chime in here with more comments more often.