With everyone (still) talking about recent web aquisitions MySpace and Youtube, and with potential aquisitions of FaceBook and other massively trafficked sites, the focus is now firmly on “what metric should we use to value a website?”.  Back in the early days of the web, webmasters touted how many hits a site received each month, but I think we’re waaaay past that point - only dumb-ass reporters from the NYPost or The Sun include Web Hits in their news pieces.  Until today, the standard metric was Page Views, meaning how many times was a page refreshed in one calendar month.  For instance, UtahSaint, ie, my blog, averages just over 100,000 page views - but does that really paint the true picture?

At the same time as counting page views, most able emedia rockstars count Unique Visitors to their website.  Simply put, a Unique Visitor is someone who visits the website - but is only counted once per 24 hours.  So, if Joe Smith visits my site 10 times per day, he’s only counted once.  This means in any given month, a daily visitor would be classed at a max of 30 unique visitors in the month.

Now here’s the problem for most website owners - they sell ads based on CPM - Cost Per Thousand (M = Thousand back in the Roman days).  Lets say I sell ads on my site for $10 CPM - if you wanted to by all the ads on my site for a month- you would take 100,000 x $10CPM = $1,000. Easy enough huh?  But now lets say you wanted to buy all the ads on my site and I told you I had only 25,000 unique visitors per month….Does this mean my CPM should really be $40 CPM(V) - meaning Cost Per Thousand Visitors?

The reason this is now becoming a rather testy problem is Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX -are becoming more commonplace.  Websites employing AJAX don’t have to refresh a page to change the content - only part of the page refreshes.  A good example can be found here on EngineeringTV - if a registered member votes for a story - only the Vote box refreshes - not the whole page - meaning the ads on the page don’t refresh - “Yikes! say the website owners - we’re not making more money!”

So, my prediction is a a swing to CPM(v) from CPM for the selling of ads and the valuation of websites in the coming months.

Having recently watched 24 Hour Party People, the history of the Manchester to Madchester music scene transformation from 1976 to 1992 - including Joy Division, New Order, The Buzzcocks, The Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and of cours, Tony Wilson, aka Anthony H. Wilson - the visionary boss of Factory Records and FAC51 - the Hacienda.

Did I mention it’s also one of the greatest music movies of all time? Anyway, ignore all that, I did a run through of cool Madchester tunes on YouTube and was pretty impressed with the range of videos available - everything from Tony Wilson interviewing The Smiths to rare live footage of Joy Division, Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses

The Smiths and Tony Wilson in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy

The web is slowly taking over TV as the most popular medium for video.  YouTube, Google Video and MSN Soapbox are getting some seriously large streams to their videos - and with Joe Internet (thats you and me) seemingly on a quest for raw content (the Saddam Hussein hanging is a perfect example) without the Fox/CNN/MSNBC filter, I predict more video sites popping up and sharing the limelight with the big guns.  On a similar note, during the day, and just for kicks, I work for Penton Media (recently purchased for a whopping $500 million) and we’ve just launched EngineeringTV - a website where video is the content - not letters and words - check it out - it maybe the next big thing.

So if 2007 is going to be the year of Internet TV, let me throw out some fun facts for each of you to snack on. I’ve been doing some homework over the last few weeks and though I can’t publicly source where all this data came from, I thought these might be of use to you while you’re planning how to spend the rest of the year (if you’d like to know where this data came from, please contact me individually)!

First off, let’s just be clear and define what Internet TV is. Specifically, according to the wiki on the topic, Internet TV simply is “television content distributed through the Internet.” That’s pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it? Very helpful.

According to the primary study I’ve been referencing, 69.5% of Internet users actively view video content online. Men are more likely to do so, at 76% versus 60.2% of women. All age groups were just as likely to watch video online, so though the audience slightly skews male, age is not a defining element. Everyone is watching!

According to the same study, 63% of the respondents who watch online video do so at least once per week, with men more likely to watch frequently as compared to women (maybe we have more free time). This number is most certainly growing as a result of the mainstream media beginning to highlight and inform general consumers where they can go to watch cool stuff (I cite the most recent video from “SNL” as an example).

News clips appear to be the largest draw, followed by movie trailers and ads, then comedy and music. What I found to be most interesting is that only 31% of those surveyed are watching TV shows or clips of their favorite shows. In much the same way we witnessed the rapid expansion of the UGC audience in 2006, I predict the rapid growth of this segment in 2007. People are beginning to become familiar with watching shows online, and new products such as Apple’s iTV will make it even easier for people to bring their favorite shows from their computer to their living room. It really is inevitable, but it will certainly take some time. If one of the networks very publicly were to air a key episode of one of their hit shows online before TV, this would dramatically increase the audience almost overnight, so keep an eye out. Someone is most definitely going to do it in the next year.

As for how Internet TV is going to grow, the wiki does a great job of explaining the technologies that will help. The most obvious is via streaming, but there are also technologies you’ve heard of but weren’t sure how to apply. BitTorrent and RSS are both very applicable in this environment and worth doing more research into.

So keep your eyes and ears focused on this topic in 2007. Since 1995 we’ve been promising change in consumer media consumption, and every year consumers continue to surprise. They took the reins last year and now comes the response from the traditional publishers of video content.