I have come across a couple of discussions about measuring User Generated Video Content recently, and thought I would share them with members. 

From Mashable -- YouTube! has recently announced that they will begin to offer a set of tools to its publishers to access "more granular metrics", beginning in the second and third quarters of this year. 

In the short term, they are focusing on being able to personalize the user experience by classifying video content as being of interest to country-specific sites.  The author speculates that this is personalization is in pursuit of being able to generate more targeted (therefore premium) ad revenues.

I also recently downloaded the free whitepaper from Web Analytics Demystified, Measuring Multimedia Content in a Web 2.0 World.

The paper outlines possible metrics for determining user engagement with online video and multimedia content, and is sponsored by Nedstat.  You can download it for free using the link above.

Interestingly, both of these sources seem to focus more on providing metrics to the commercial publisher, who is leveraging Web 2.0 technologies as a means to achieve mass distribution for their premium content or advertising messsages, rather than as a tool to understand the user patterns of individuals sharing content, or self-organizing communities.

To me, it raises the question, where do the self-organizing niche communities that define web 2.0 fit into the commercial model of the future?  Will they get squeezed out of their own revolution?