It seems like yume is being disengenous in trying to make their ad network look like bigger than it actually is. Thedigi is right in that Yume is essentially counting all uniques for every publisher, even though the publisher might only have videos on 5% of their pages and only 10% of uniques see their video ads. It’s like Pepsi saying their product gets seen by every single shopper who walks into Walmart, even though Pepsi cans are only on a portion of a shelf where a small fraction of ppl see them (no offense, Pepsi). I can see why yume wants to lie about their size though. It’s a smokescreen to advertisers b/c advertisers tend to buy scale and reach first. In this case, they got burned.

I do like your blog, though. I’ve been very interested in that whole space for quite a while (www.thedigitalhobo.com)

Thanks for the clarification. It definitely sounded like you were saying that they ‘were’ serving as many ads.

Pretty stupid move on their part overall. Why would an ad network that doesn’t sell display advertising try to compete (on numbers) in a report that has networks that sell banners? Piss poor decision making on their part, and they are upset that it is being handled properly.

More importantly, though, they STILL haven’t removed the old comScore data from their homepage. Doesn’t look like they are playing very nicely with comScore.

Oddly enough, they could have avoided the whole mess by being listed in the proper report. There is a “streams only” report, the comScore VideoMetrix report, which would accurately represent their numbers. They are just picking the wrong battle.

Some networks frequency cap to protect the user experience. The better measure – reach, or potential reach, or available number of streams – are much better measures.

If one network has 250 million streams, but serves a pre-roll in front of every one, you’ve got a problem. If you have 1 billion streams, and serve an ad once in every 4 videos, you’d have the same number of ads served, but a much happier user base.

Liz, if you are correct, and they serve as many ads as those in the Top 10, then they are bombarding their users with ads. And thats not good. I’m guessing they aren’t serving anywhere close to those numbers.