Business Media

It’s well documented that video provides publishers with an opportunity to engage their audience in a different way to text or audio. Publishers do it in different ways too; some monetise it and some don’t.

Those that do monetise video do it via pre roll adverts like Virgin Media do with latest football action after weekend games. Some use in banner and in text video, which utilises the traditional ad spaces on a web page.

Often publishers then submit their video to content networks such as Blinkx and take a revenue share split when they cannot monetise it directly. Alternatively they can get advertisers to sponsor content.

Engaging

Research from eMarketer suggests that video is one of the most engaging and interactive formats online. The Online Publishing Association reported that almost half of the viewers it surveyed who saw an online video ad reacted positively, and almost one third went to the advertisers’ website and looked for more product information.

Video makes the viewer “lean forward” even more so than when they are consuming text, audio or images. If delivered properly and the users sees the content as it was meant then it is the easiest format to entertain, inform or even both.

Although figures are constantly revised, video ad spend in Europe is expected to jump from $200 million in 2008 to $2.460 billion 2012.

So is video really going to be “easy” money for online business publishers? And who is going to take most of that spend? The publisher, the technology supplier or the network?

Drivers

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at www.hipmojo.com commented on this topic earlier in January and argued that advertisers need to be more involved in driving the expected growth of video advertising, just like they did with TV.

MediaVest’s connectivetissue managing director, Brian Terkelsen, warned that “advertisers aren’t being aggressive enough in general – they helped grow TV to where it is now, so I think it’s partly up to them to drive video. If we don’t challenge the industry to do things differently, we’re screwed.”

Additionally Karbasfrooshan analysed where advertising budgets would be spent, commenting that video content providers with broad appeal were suffering.

In the same article BitGravity CEO, Perry Wu, suggested that the credit crunch is positively impacting those publishers who are proactively servicing niche audiences as they are more attractive for advertisers.

“We work with hundreds of content companies and to be honest, many of them won’t survive. Indie sites that have premium news or sports content and a targeted audience can prove that they’re valuable to advertisers—but some of the broad, more generalized companies will have a harder time.”

Unlocking the door

To maximise the commercial opportunities from video it is vital that technology providers are able to unlock the value of trusted content with publishers too.

One technology company BusinessMedia.co.uk has had the pleasure in speaking to is Ooyala. EMEA Director Jonathan Milne described their aim as very simple: “Ooyala’s main focus is helping people make the most money from video content online”. Pretty simple, but how?

The origin of Ooyala is straight from Google. Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe and Bismarck Lepe were part of the development team that brought us AdSense, AdWords and Google Web Search.

Learning from their experiences in the search space they set about their own revolution. Using their syndication platform, publishers can upload videos, insert ads and track the success of their campaigns with an exceptional analytics package. As well as providing these features’ one of the key differentiators of the Ooyala technology it that it enables publishers to “transcode” their video which reformats the video, making it compatible with the many different distribution methods of the internet.

So far Ooyala has raised over 10 million dollars in funding and has in excess of 5000 publishers using its syndication platform – Backlot. Ooyala are helping large publishers like Bebo, comedy.com and the London Symphony Orchestra. Their platform and pricing model means that it is very accessible for us all – whether you’re a business media publisher or not.

Making content pay

So in summary what have we learnt from this series of Making Content Pay?

1. Video engages our audiences. And serving video to niche audiences is key if we are to build and grow viable business models – whether business or consumer media.
2. We need more B2B publisher case studies on video usage
3. Success stories from UK B2B marketers using online video advertising remain thin on the ground

Next time

In a few weeks we’ll take our every day experience in online, digital advertising to discuss: the CPA advertising model: from a marketer’s perspective.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ooyala founders share their grand vision (vator.tv)
• Ooyala Launches Innovative Video Advertising Feature Set : New Capability of Company’s Ground-breaking Ooyala Backlot Video Content Management System Helps Video Owners Improve Return on Investment (ROI) (seomashup.blogspot.com)

This entry was posted on February 4, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Analysis, News.

Tags: Online Video, ooyala, video business media