REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. and NEW YORK: Online video advertising platform YuMe and media buyer Mindshare have defined a new metric for video advertising campaigns, the Internet Gross Ratio Point, or “iGRP.”

Mindshare executive Bethany Mach said her firm was looking for a way to measure Internet ad buys that could be compared to TV ratings “to compare, contrast and analyze online video. We need a standard approach we can all apply to measure audience and reach across any screen.”

iGRP measures total delivery volume of a message to the target audience like traditional GRP--calculated as frequency x reach x 100. For TV, a media buyer might calculate reach by dividing the number of males aged 18 to 34 who saw a given advertisement, by the total U.S. population of men that age.

iGRP works the same, but determines reach by dividing online households or demographic groups by the total number of U.S. households or members of that demographic. A white paper outlining the methodology is on the YuMe Web site.

YuMe plans to calculate iGRPs for each of its network channels on a monthly basis and make it comparable to a television GRP by using total population and/or household numbers. The company also has several experiments planned help media agencies and advertisers determine effectively for different online video campaigns.

YuMe was named among the top 15 Online Video Companies by Fierce Markets last year.

“YuMe lays claim to the largest video advertising network, and it has the stats to back it up,” Fierce editor Pete Wylie wrote. “ComScore ranks YuMe eighth in total online ads with the YuMe Video Network reaches 134 million unique visitors a month (comScore, June 2008). The company represents more than 400 video sites and serves upward of 500 million streams monthly.”

Investors in the three year old company include Khosla Ventures, Accel, BV Capital and DAG Ventures.