In a column last month, I wrote about the methods behind a U.K. marketing firm's ranking of the 10 most popular online videos. The firm, Viral Factory, was forced to improvise in arriving at some of its estimates for videos that debuted before the YouTube era, when email, not the Web, was the preferred tool for sharing.Yet even today's videos, generally watched on sites that count each view and publish the numbers, can be hard to track -- just another reminder that on the Internet, supposedly the most quantifiable medium, users remain hard to count.
To understand the video-numbers predicament, consider the site vidmeter.com, which launched this week. Its software crawls 10 major video sites, including YouTube, and grabs the stats they display. Vidmeter's editors sift through the top videos and tally total views, taking into consideration that the same video is often posted on multiple sites. (Sometimes, the same video is posted many times on a single site -- there were 18 different versions of a popular "Saturday Night Live" clip on YouTube on a recent check, according to vidmeter). Vidmeter does its crawl each day, and ranks videos on views over the most recent 24 hours. There's more detail here, and the rankings are listed here (though be aware that the site doesn't filter results -- some videos contain adult content.)