The Internet Advertising Bureau is developing a standard metric to use for measuring web video, reports TVWeek.

The move comes as the agency seeks to provide a common currency for a format that, to date, features a hodgepodge of different players trying a plethora of different marketing options. The conversation comes amid a flurry of claims by major distribution outlets of how many hundreds of thousands of streams they've delivered. It also comes as more and more monetization plans pop up, seemingly every day.

Standardized methods of determining audience figures could help tap even deeper into advertising budgets. Online video is already expected to garner $1.31 billion in ad revenue this year, a number that is likely to go no other direction than up in the near term.

One point of contention when it comes to counting streams is that a longer TV show delivered online may be broken into four or five seperate streams to make for more efficient delivery. But that boosts the number of streams a network can claim it's delivered, which some see as artificial since, theoretically, only one viewer is being served.