Saturday, November 17, 2007

Monetizing Web Video

I was reading Erick Schonfeld's TechCrunch piece on Pre-Roll Video advertising. I agree wholeheartedly that the current TV-inspired video advertising model completely sucks. At least with my TiVo I can race past the ads! I was watching some of the CBS content on Veoh last night over a DSL line and this just highlighted some of the issues that are still to be dealt with.Part way through watching an episode of Numb3rs iTunes started downloading one of my favorite podcasts and the video started breaking up. You can understand why people are downloading TV and movies via iTunes and watching them offline. Anyway, I digress, The insertion of ads mid-roll that you can't skip over is frustrating. There definitely needs to be a new model that leverages the strength of the web and not just mindlessly transfer the TV model. Some of the more interesting video models out there include: Blip.tv - They are experimenting with flash overlays embedded in the video content. This has the advantage of being embeddable in podcasts and it is a method that viewers have become used to as the networks increasingly advertise shows by overlaying the information in other shows. So blip is experimenting with advertising but I believe there are some fascinating developments going on that may provide pointers to the future. Here are two of my favorites:

Viddler

Viddler provides a social video experience. Video Publishers can configure their videos to allow comments and tags. Comments can be text or video. This approach creates the potential for advertisers to insert advertising at relevant points in the broadcast. This offers some very interesting opportunities for innovative advertising.

Mogulus

Mogulus is doing some fascinating work. Their Studio is a web based media studio. The feature I really like is the opening Mogulus grid. It features a central video that is surrounded by 26 other thumbnail video snapshots and an interactive chat stream. The online video is really vibrant. If you come across a great video site share it by leaving a comment on this blog.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous8:11 AM

    boo-box has a great solution for product ads in video content. It uses affiliate programs (like Amazon) to monetize video publishers.

    http://boo-box.com/blog/en/

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