I know a couple of kids who are pretty good with a digital video camera. They make videos of themselves romping around, they do a light edit using iMovie, and then they post the video on social networks like Facebook. They get lots of page views.

Make no mistake: online video is like candy and we’re all like four-year-olds at the candy counter. We can’t seem to decide which 10 candies we want most. According to The New York Times, the latest viral video from China involves a song about an oddly-named horse that is not only a sound-alike for an epithet, but is also a thinly veiled protest against censorship. It’s wildly popular.

Companies are taking advantage of the craze. Or are they? One could also say the craze is taking advantage of some companies.

The companies who’ll win in the digital video space are the ones who can effectively measure. The rest will just be having some rather advanced and maybe even expensive fun, kind of like the kids using iMovie.

This brings me to the first myth about measuring online video:

Myth #1: Viewership of online video can’t be meaningfully measured.

Fact: Yes it can. First, you need to decide whether you’re going to measure just the video on your own site, or whether you’re going to include how that video is used in places you can’t control (see Myth #2 on my next post).

For now, let’s focus on video measurement in content areas under your control. Sure, it’s fairly simple to equate a “page view” of a web page containing a video to a “video view,” but that would be making too many assumptions for a meaningful measure. More important would be to properly place java script tags “inside” the video so you can measure whether users played the video, where they paused, where they stopped, whether they replayed it, and more.

Some tools Like Divinity Metrics’ “Scope 3” product even allow you to track whether they forwarded it to friends, including demographics of the people who forwarded it. So—yes, you can measure online video meaningfully. Explore.

Disclaimer: Technology Leaders is a reseller of Divinity Metrics tools.

During the next few days, look for my second and third ” Measuring On-line Video myth v. fact” postings.