Boston.com Overview

Boston.com is one of the most visited regional portals in the U.S. and is part of the digital business unit of The New York Times Company.  Their mission is to provide audiences trusted editorial content from The Boston Globe and other sources.  Increasingly, video has become an important component of the editorial mix for Boston.com.  For several years video content has been delivered through strategic relationships with local broadcasters New England Cable News and New England Sports Network.  More recently, as the appetite for video content increases, Boston.com is expanding the use of video that it produces itself as well as video content that is user-generated.  Video is becoming a more important component in such areas as entertainment, special news reports, sports and even breaking news.

Over the years, the digital media powerhouse has adopted a stable of measurement best practices and technologies to capture data on web page viewers.  However, page view metrics alone do not tell a complete story for Internet video.  An early adopter in an emerging market, Boston.com is working to develop a fuller assessment of their Internet video audience's in-stream behavior by partnering with Visible Measures.

Using Visible Measures' Internet video audience measurement suite, Boston.com is capturing new data about their audience's access to, consumption of, and engagement with individual videos.  For instance, early results show that Internet video audience engagement is not necessarily tied to video length. In the world of online news, fresh new content is critical.

With the Visible Measures suite, Boston.com has identified powerful viewing patterns associated with demographics, editorial design, day-of-the week and time-of-day viewing that will have an important effect on marketing and promotion of Internet video content.

This audience behavior measurement data will allow Boston.com to continually refine Internet video content, create compelling packages for advertisers, and more effectively promote video content through distribution partners.