Digital Media Conference: Growth needs standards

For online video to move from its current, largely experimental phase to a commercially meaningful business, several critical things need to happen, panelists at the Digital Media Conference agreed here Thursday."We need standardization around three things," Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan said. "First, we need to agree on what is [an ad] ‘view.' We've all gone to Web sites where some ad starts playing automatically until you can figure out how to mute the sound. There are companies that pump out 40 million impressions that way, but is that a view the same way click-to-play is a view?"Second," she added, "we need appropriate ad-format standards [for video]. Is 30 seconds, or even 15 seconds really the best format for pre-rolls? Why not seven seconds, or 10?""Third," Kaplan continued, "we need a Nielsen for the Web, some third party advertisers could trust to provide real data."