Now that we convinced you that engagement is important, the next key question becomes: How do we measure this thing called engagement?

For years the television has been selling engagement as simply being "on-air" a commercial that is spliced in between cliffhangers of their blockbuster drama.  Magazines have done the same by putting in pages of advertising that interrupts your reading experience.

The only way that online video companies can measure "engagement" right now with a video is if you engage with it (duh!), that is (via visiblemeasures) every pause, play, rewind, fast-forward, replay, copy, embed, repost, forward, sharing, and comment...from every video, user, and site. The web has created its own

custom online video metrics by measuring when the video starts, when the ads start, when the content starts, when the interstitial ads come on, and how much is watched.  With the coming of embedded videos, other metrics have emerged to calculate distribution effectiveness such as where the video is posted and how this distribution affects the overall impact of the video, page view/video view ratios, user generated content regarding the video, and others.

Coupled with the age, gender, zip code, and other demographic information, online video provides an excellent way to serve up targeted ads......but....

The various video sites have different measures for what constitutes a view.  Nothing is standardized for their advertisers.  Online, even our wealth of data doesn't matter if viewers are not actually watching the commercial.

This has been the bane of television since its inception.  Traditional media sells these eyeballs to advertisers but people know that commercials are usually the time when folks go to the kitchen, the bathroom, or channel surf.  Online, you can always just open another window to type out an email while the video is playing in the background.

So with all of these analytics we still have the issue of engagement.  How can I force a viewer to watch a video?  They can press play but I can't hold their eyeballs to the screen, especially when my sponsor's message is playing.  If we could have a simple metric that had viewers click on something to "stay alive" then we know that they are watching. 

Perhaps we should take a step back and learn a lesson from an old and dying medium: Radio.  Because of the limit of senses with radio, they've always done things a bit different (via Howard Stern) and integrated the brand sponsors with the talent.  Product placement?  Sponsorship?  Blatant commercial?  The line will get grayer as we figure this one out....