How We Report

Transparency is part of the service, not an afterthought. Here is exactly what you will see during a campaign, what we can and can't measure, and the reasoning behind both.

Reporting cadence

Our reporting runs monthly. That is the cadence the service is built on, and it gives each campaign enough room to show a real trend rather than daily noise.

For the duration of your campaign, we are also happy to send a short summary every Friday. We would rather you have the visibility than be left chasing it.

What we report

Every month, you will receive clear figures on:

• Delivered views
• Daily pace
• Public engagement, including likes and comments
• Keyword rankings

These are the numbers the campaign is measured on, and they sit fully within our reach to track and verify.

What we can't report, and why

We would rather be precise than promise something we can't deliver. A few metrics sit outside what anyone in our position can access, and the reasons are worth understanding.

Watch time, average view duration, audience retention, return-viewer rate, and demographics. All of these live inside YouTube Studio, which only the channel owner can open. Your talk sits on TED's channel, so no third party, including us, can pull those figures. This holds true for every TEDx speaker, and is not a limitation specific to your campaign. If you need them for a speaking application or pitch, they would have to come from TED directly, and in our experience they don't usually extend that backend access.

Engagement rate on the traffic we drive. Once a viewer clicks an ad and lands on YouTube, the ad network's tracking ends at that point. Nothing follows a person from a placement onto a YouTube video to measure what they do next. That means no one can cleanly separate an engagement rate for campaign-driven traffic from organic traffic, whatever they might claim.

On placement sources

Two things are worth covering here.

First, programmatic and native ad inventory is served through real-time auctions. Placements are decided dynamically, load by load, so there is no fixed list of URLs sitting anywhere to hand over.

See it for yourself in about thirty seconds.

Open this article, make sure your ad blocker is off, then refresh the page a few times and watch the ad slots change on each load:

Crowded fountains and scorching streets: Europe's record-breaking heat wave in photos

Every refresh is a separate auction serving a different ad. There is no way to see or predict which ad lands on which page at any given moment, which is why a static "here are the sites" report is not something the networks expose to anyone.

Second, and more directly: our ad-buying network, inventory whitelists, and distribution infrastructure are proprietary to Redstage Media. That network is the core of how the business runs and its main competitive advantage, so we don't share site-by-site publisher lists or granular destination logs. What you will always get is clear reporting on delivery, pacing, engagement, and rankings, which is what the campaign is built to deliver.

Organic rankings vs organic growth

One last distinction worth drawing clearly. Organic audience growth has never been part of the service. Third-party viewer behaviour can't be forced, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we work on is the visibility and ranking of your talk through the traffic we drive. Where it travels from there is shaped by the talk itself.