Omniture recently announced that they are working with Adobe to: “provide greater measurement of rich media for applications built with Adobe® Flash®, Adobe Flex™ and Adobe AIR™” (source). In my opinion this could cause a monopoly for rich media analytics, but hopefully they would share with the rest of us.
What jumped into my mind first when I heard this was the fact that traditional analytics companies like Nielsen Media Research are losing their share with measuring audiences, especially internet audiences. The second thing that came to mind, and the fact one that affects a lot more of us, is that gathering analytics from most Adobe products will be expensive and on a tight leash.
The architecture of flash, adobe products are traditionally constructed as independent files. Advanced flash development can produce a file that provides usability and interaction with the user, which can help the webmaster in collecting data off these files (mostly from where the user navigates to from the rich media file). Otherwise the entire flash file is one link, which does very little for a webmaster because it provides the same data as a link.
What would do a lot of goof for my view of Adobe and Omniture is to produce a free syndicated application or service that can be imbed into flash which reports to a analytics system (which Omniture just happens to specialize in).
If Omniture and Adobe’s collaboration is kept on a tight leash then the analytics for rich media like flash will become very expensive and available. You might say they could have a monopoly on the data.
I pose the question then as to how webmasters and those in charge of analytics are getting data off their rich media files and plan to in the future?
I’d also like to know what you think a cooperation between Omniture, Adobe and YouTube would produce in testing and developing greater analytics for the public, since they are trying to do that anyway.
