Nielsen Company acquires GlanceGuide

Nielsen looking to improve its online video analytics services

Nielsen Company, announced on Tuesday, it has acquired GlanceGuide, a video analytics and technology company based out of Palo Alto, Ca.  The terms of the deal were not disclosed.  

The two companies have been partnered for some time.  Back in 2009, Nielsen had selected GlanceGuide as its technology partner to help with streamlining the video data collection process.  Nielsen said this partnership was a response to, "global client feedback."

Nielsen said with the acquisition, GlanceGuide's analytics capabilities have been immediately integrated into its own measurement tools.  The company said its clients, which include media publishers, agencies and advertisers, would now have improved capabilities as to understanding who is watching online video each day. 

We receive online video trend reports from Nielsen about once a month.  They tell us what online video sites are seeing the most traffic, what events drive the most traffic to a site, and things like year-over-year increase in traffic, etc.  GlanceGuide has a more hyper-detailed technology which actually measures what a user does after they hit play, so for example, when they decide to stray away from a video and what time in the video they exit exactly.  

Dave Osborn, SVP of online product leadership for Nielsen said, "Nielsen is fully committed to providing our clients with actionable, comprehensive and immediate insights about online video consumption […] so this was a natural and exciting extension of Nielsen’s current offerings to the advertising community.”

I'll be looking forward to some more detailed online video reports in the near future.