As online video is here to stay, understanding how it performs is crucial. Multi-Channel Network (MCN) aggregate video content to sell packaged audiences to advertisers on YouTube, mimicking how TV audiences are sold. Historically, TV has been measured on audience share and until now, comparative performance of YouTube MCNs has been a problem for online advertisers. Using the wealth of data available from YouTube, the VIDIRO MCN ‘fingerprint’ offers a quick way to evaluate MCN performance, scale and structure in a way that is familiar to advertisers used to TV ratings systems. VIDIRO’s digital fingerprint technology could prove to be disruptive play in the industry, as it maps the relative performance and valuation of a channel network in comparison to others, providing transparency that hasn’t existed before. VIDIRO, which is headquartered at NexusUCD, the Industry Partnership Centre at University College Dublin (UCD), provides a comprehensive and comparable way to measure the audience share of a MCN across the whole YouTube universe. “Fingerprint analysis could become the key performance indicator for any company, traditional or digital, which is invested in YouTube video. This is especially relevant as earlier this week we published a white paper with IHS Inc which indicates that global advertising revenue from online video doubled to $11.2 billion between 2011 and 2014, and will jump to $13.8 billion in 2015 with forecasts that by 2017, online video advertising revenues will reach $19 billion,” says Simon Factor, VIDIRO CEO. Though useful to advertisers, the fingerprint also provides an analysis of the health and growth of an MCN and it is possible to see if audiences are skewed or evenly distributed within a network. VIDIRO, which specialises in advertising technologies, curates YouTube inventory to collect detailed information on the top two million performing channels, including the MCN affiliation for each. Now advertisers can see exactly the makeup of an MCN's best performing channels. “StyleHaul’s share of views in the top 10,000 YouTube channels is 10 per cent of VEVO’s,” reports Factor. “But they compete strongly with VEVO across the long tail in terms of subscriber growth, picking up one subscriber for every two VEVO gains. “Such a statistic demonstrates a high level of engagement among StyleHaul fans, but it also points towards differences in how fans consume beauty versus music videos,” says Factor. VIDIRO, an award-winning Irish video analytics company, has been an active participant in Big Data research for many years and is a founder member company of the industry-led Centre for Applied Data Analytics Research (CeADAR) which is also headquartered at NexusUCD. “Being close to the heart of cutting-edge research at University College Dublin is important to us as a company; as innovators and engineers we love to know what new things are happening in industry and how other companies are meeting Big Data challenges,” says Factor.