The Russian channel NTV and research company Mediascope have conducted the country’s first survey of audience viewing on YouTube.
Undertaken from July to September and employing audio watermarking technology, it showed that around 15% of Muscovites aged 18+ on average watched premier content on NTV on YouTube on all platforms (desktops, TVs and mobile screens).
NTV is currently the leader among Russian TV channels on YouTube: the total number of subscribers to NTV and the news programnme “Today” has exceeded 11.5 million, and the number of views 12.6 billion.
Commenting on the survey, NTV general producer Timur Weinstein said: “Thanks to the experiment, it was possible to determine the coverage, average daily viewing time and age range of viewers. These are important metrics for advertisers that we have now learned to track. At the same time, NTV content posted on YouTube was more in demand among young respondents under the age of 44. So far, we have a rating on the lower limit, as not all content participated in the testing, but only the premiere, the total number of views of which was about a third (28%) of all views on YouTube”.
Mediascope’s CEO Ksenia Achkasova added: “Today, the viewer has a lot of opportunities to watch interesting content at any time and on any screen, and the media is interested in knowing exactly where the contact with the audience takes place. However, there is no single way to measure the diversity of TV viewing, so Mediascope is constantly testing many new technologies to include all possible fragments in the measurements. The test using audio watermarking was successful, so in the future this technology can become another tool of our company to collect the most complete information about human contacts with content and advertising in various media”.
