Mike Hudack is a tumblelog.

On statistics

I posted this comment in reply to this post on Silicon Alley Insider: 

I believe that TubeMogul has corrected their research about blip counting embeds. Their CEO e-mailed me today to apologize for their error. 
In terms of restrictions by IP address, I understand AOL Survivor’s comments. We’re probably undercounting to some degree because we do restrict view counting based on IPs. 

We’re not kidding ourselves, though. We understand that IP Address != Person. We understand that AOL viewers often come from the same IP, and we likewise understand that entire offices often come from a single IP. 
That said, we face a challenge which is shared by the entire Web video ecosystem. We have to count views realistically, and in fact conservatively. Failure to do so invites advertisers, investors and content producers to lose confidence in viewership numbers offered by Web video companies… which would be disastrous in the medium and long term, as I’m sure you understand. 

For the moment, therefore, we use IP addresses because they allow us to be suitably conservative. In the future we may move to a Flash shared object method for counting uniques — similar to the cookie-based approach that many Web analytics companies use. The only reason we haven’t moved to this approach already is because we serve a pretty significant slice of the Web video ecosystem that doesn’t use Flash (i.e. iTunes, Apple TV, Sony Bravia televisions, et cetera). So rather than go the way of YouTube (over-count, over-count, over-count) we’ve decided to slightly undercount and thereby maintain the confidence of advertisers, investors and content creators. 

We could probably double, triple or even quadruple our viewership numbers by going the way of YouTube — but would that really be good for our business, or anyone else’s.