Counting eyeballs tougher in digital world.

As advertisers struggle to develop business models for tech-driven new media options, there remains one constant: eyeballs must be counted.

Whether the platform is wireless, broadband, Internet or pay-per-view, Madison Avenue needs to know whether it is getting its money's worth.

Internet video viewership is difficult to quantify, and that has firmly kept a lid on advertiser spending. Broadband and wireless ad spending, while growing, was only at $300 million in 2005, according to tracking firm Carat Digital. While television has been losing viewers to competition from the Web and ad-skipping software like TiVo, it still pulled in about $60 billion in ads last year.

"It's such a diffuse world out there in terms of people watching video all over the place," said Brad Greenspan, founder of VidiLife video social networking site and former chief executive of Intermix Media, creators of MySpace.com.

There's no direct comparison to Nielson ratings on a Web-video basis. Internet data services comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen SoundScan only track the number of visitors to a Web site, not how many people view and share a particular video.

In order to coax advertisers to support video on the Web, "You need someone to tell you 'this is how many people are going to see your ad,'" said Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder of Jib Jab Media Inc.

"Historically through offline advertising, you'd know that if you spend so many marketing dollars, you're going to reach so many people, and you can expect a certain lift for your brand/product/service," said Todd Chanko, media analyst with JupiterResearch. But measuring ads on viral Web videos? "It's not an exact science," Chanko said.

Measuring 'engagement'

The Web isn't the only medium where advertisers are demanding better measurement tools. With viewing technology moving faster than bean-counting, the landscape is wide open for a new standard. In January, Nielsen's People Meter data started including digital recorder viewing, to accommodate the TiVo phenomenon and cable providers' own DVRs.

Radio ratings company Arbitron and Nielsen parent company VNU Media have collaborated with consumer products giant Procter & Gamble Corp. for a new service, dubbed Project Apollo, that will monitor consumers' exposure to multimedia advertising and purchasing behavior. In advertising-speak, the new formula measures "engagement"--how seduced a consumer is by a particular form of advertising. How much time they spend watching, listening, reading an ad, what other activities they do simultaneously, and which media spurred a purchase.

The project involves about 6,000 people from Nielsen's People Meter population who will carry around a beeper-like device that picks up media exposure around town, and these folks will scan all their purchases once they get home.

But the service is still in its initial "test phase," and it's unclear whether it will address the vast unknowns of Internet viewership.

A video Web site can track its number of visitors for advertisers, but if somebody copies a link and pastes it into an email--the usual method for viral spreading of videos--it's hard to do a thorough analysis of whether the ad was actually seen.

"How can we tell which click-throughs are a result of an e-mail, and which are the result of an advertisement? That's a much more difficult measure to make," Chanko said.

Companies like Revver Inc. are implementing tracking software on their site's videos that follow the clip as it travels through the Web. JibJab's animated shorts are distributed by MSN Network and are advertiser-supported. Viewers clicking on a JibJab video must watch a 15- or 30-second ad before gaining access to the video.

In the wide-open world of Web video, companies are vying to create the standard of measurement. This struggle is not new, but it's made more urgent by the number of video Web sites seeking to sustain themselves on advertising.

Even Jib Jab--whose first short was viewed 80 million times in 2004--couldn't support itself on ad revenue alone. It hires itself out to make animated commercials for such products as Budweiser. "That's how we pay the bills around here," Spiridellis said.