Views, like friends, and followers is a numbers game. It’s what you do with those views and friends and followers that matters. Are you funny and witty with your posts? Do you share insightful and valuable information? Once you’ve gained the audience with number of views, how do you keep them interested in your brand? Views can create exposure and advertising opportunities, but engagement can indicate loyalty and purchase intent. It all depends on the success criteria a brand is looking to measure. 
Many articles have been written about this topic and often use YouTube as an example of the mothership of all portals in terms of video. The key word here is portal. It’s a once stop shop used for direct search purposes, after hearing about some song, commercial, video, or event. The popularity of the video is often measured by the number of views it has received. However, the chances of anyone stumbling across a branded video is slight, which is a challenge if views are what brands are after. Not only that, but a recent study found that user engagement could actually be more difficult on YouTube (Source: MediaPost). Therefore, YouTube is one strategy, not the only strategy.
The above mentioned study compared 20 YouTube videos using TrueView as a strategy, with the same 20 videos using a video syndication strategy. It used a measurement formula called Engagement Per Thousand Views (EPM) to measure likes, comments, tweets, pins, shares and posts to calculate the engagement per 1,000 views. The engagement factor was significantly lower for the TrueView videos compared to the videos syndicated to other websites outside of YouTube. Facebook engagement in particular, was higher for the syndicated branded videos than it was for UGC videos, which is good news for brands (Source: MediaPost).
We have discussed the views versus engagement debate over a series of multiple past posts in this blog, which basically sum up the challenges of marketing video in a banner world, focused on impressions. There are also many industry articles discussing the challenges to the viewing tracking mechanism by companies like comScore with the introduction of vCE, and most recently a vCPM proposal, by a member of the “Data Driven Thinking” community (Source: adexchanger.com). While the industry is still settling on a uniformed standard, brands will need to decide for themselves which is the most measurable and meaningful way for them to track.
About Preview Networks
Preview Networks is a content marketing platform for brands and content aggregation and syndication platform for publishers. We provide the tools for brands to centrally distribute and manage marketing and PR content across media destinations, devices, and commerce platforms; allowing media partners to automate content acquisition delivering audience and advertising revenue growth.
