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Jivox nets two key parternships

Pete Wylie — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:41:25 -0500

Jivox announced two partnership agreements Thursday that will extend the reach of the industry's largest local online video ad service. Jivox will serve its customers custom video solutions from PixelFish. In return, PixelFish will co-brand Jivox's self-service ad platform and publisher network for PixelFish's adverstisers, opening new markets for Jivox. In a separate partnership agreement, Jivox will place its online video ads alongside Local.com's regionally targeted search results.

Jivox's geo-targeted ads are a big part of its appeal to both partners, but Jivox is the real winner in these deals, as it adds services with PixelFish and distribution channels with Local.com. Jivox is clear about its intentions to dominate local video advertising, a sector the Kelsey Group predicts could be producing $1.5 billion by 2012. PixelFish brings original content from 2,500 videographers from around the world to the table for Jivox's customers to integrate into their custom ads. Those ads could then be served on Local.com's search page, so it's not hard to see the synergies Jivox creates with these two deals.

Jivox drew down $10.7 million in VC funding in June, and it looks poised to making good on that investment if it continues to make savvy and symbiotic parternship deals like these two. It already quadrupled ad revenue and advertisers in the third quarter.

For more:
- see the adotas.com story here

Related article
Jivox sees strong growth in Q3

Akamai buys acerno, gets targeted ads

Pete Wylie — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:45:02 -0400

Akamai, the Cambridge-Mass.-based CDN, announced a foray into targeted advertising Tuesday with the acquisition of acerno. The transaction, slated to be completed by the end of the quarter, will integrate acerno's shopping and purchase data capture technology into Akamai's Advetising Decisions Solution, which was also announced Tuesday.

Anonymous data generated by acerno's technology will allow advertisers to select appropriate slices of viewership to market their products. According to Akamai, the partnership allows advertisers to streamline ad offerings and generate the most ROI possible. Attempting to allay privacy concerns from the start, Akamai assured customers that the data used in the targeted ads is completely anonymous end-user purchasing and browsing information.

Many top retailers give anonymous data to acerno so the company can generate its predictive reports about online consumer behavior. These reports indicate all steps in online purchasing and analyzes each to determine how consumers find a product, put it in to their online shopping cart, and eventually purchase the item.

Better metrics allow advertisers to star feeling better about placing this ad around online video content. So expect acerno and Akamai's collaboration to be a popular, and profitable one.

For more:
- see the Akamai press release here

Jivox sees strong growth in Q3

Pete Wylie — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:33:24 -0400

Jivox, a San Mateo, Calif., company specializing in targeted local video ads for SMBs, announced impressive growth indicators in a release Monday. Both its number of advertisers and ad revenue quadrupled from the previous quarter. Jivox also states that the reach of its ad network has expanded by 38 percent to reach 55 million unique visitors.

"We're seeing significant adoption of online video advertising by small businesses who want to reach a targeted, local audience," Jivox CEO Diaz Nesamoney said in a released statement. "As these companies seek to find more cost-effective ways to advertise their business, self-service online video advertising is proving to be a great opportunity."

Nesamoney previously co-founded Informatica, a data-integration software company that went public in 1999 and currently has $400 million annual revenue..

Jivox released the third version of its technology platform recently and attributes some of its success to the more streamlined features and improved troubleshooting and support. Jivox claims to operate the nation's only locally focused network of premium publishers and uses this distribution model to drive the success of its advertisers' messages to targeted audiences.

For more:
- see the Jivox release here

Fierce 15 Online Video Movers and Shakers: YuMe

Pete Wylie — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:29:24 -0400

YuMe
Founded: March 2007
Location: Redwood City, Calif.
Investors: Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures
www.yume.com

YuMe lays claim to the largest video advertising network, and it has the stats to back it up. 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.

YuMe offers more than 10 different ways to advertise over online videos, including post and pre-roll, overlays, branded players, and in-text video, delivering ads to brand-safe content across platforms.

Working both sides of the street -- by collaborating with content publishers and advertisers that want to pair their customers with online video -- enables YuMe to offer great value to everyone. It has achieved wide scope with limited capital investment; reports indicate YuMe has taken down a mere $16 million in two rounds of venture money.

Back to FOV Fierce 15

Fierce 15 Online Video Movers and Shakers: EveryZing

Pete Wylie — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:28:18 -0400

EveryZing
Founded: 2006
Location: Cambridge, MA
Investors: Spun out of BBN Technologies in 2006
www.everyzing.com

Spun out of BBN Technologies, (One of the real fathers of the Internet, not Al Gore), EveryZing builds on speech research conducted by BBN to generate a very accurate, timely and searchable transcript of the audio content in online videos.

Sound boring? The resulting copy is indexed and optimized to return highly relevant search results, driving traffic to professional content, and thereby earning advertisers good ROI on placement. Gotta love a tool that feeds SEO.

CEO Tom Wilde says transcription time is roughly one-to-one with the source video file, meaning a 10 minute video is transcripted and posted a mere 12 or 13 minutes after processing starts. The SaaS company employs six speech scientists who work to refine the quality of the transcripts to assure quality and accuracy. EveryZing currently can produce text from English and Spanish audio and video and would like to test other markets soon.

Customers are mostly large media companies like FoxNews, Fox Sports, Cox Radio and boston.com. Since adopting Everyzing's software eight months ago, boston.com has 50,000 pages archived in fully-searchable format, dramatically increasing its web presence.

Next: Move Networks

Google AdSense To Distribute MacFarlane Video Series

Doug Mohney — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:05:05 -0400

The buzz is swirling around details with Google's deal to distribute Seth MacFarlane's project though AdSense.

MacFarlane, creator of "Family Guy" on Fox, is going to roll out "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy" this September to thousands of web sites with the appropriately targeted demographic. There will be 50 two minute episodes with new characters in the multimillion dollar production and advertisers are going to have to pay up lots more than if they generically placed the same ad through AdSense.

Options for advertisers will include prerolls, a banner to be placed at the bottom of the video or a simple "Brought to you by" note at the beginning with MacFarlane, the underwriting ad agency, Google and the website generating the click/view splitting the revenues four ways. For a larger fee, advertisers can animate original commercials to run with the series.

For more:
- Paidcontent.org breaks down the Google/MacFarlane deal

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Slapping Down YouTube and Hulu

Doug Mohney — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:38:16 -0400

TheStreet.com says that if you could take YouTube's audience and mix it with Hulu's ability to generate revenue, you'd be able to make some serious money. But that hasn't happened, so the two companies have been taken to task, each for not having the assets the other one does.

YouTube pulled 67.8 million unique viewers in May and served up 3.84 billion streams, dominating Nielson Online's numbers. Hulu only had 2.7 unique visitors and 80 million streams. However, it's not size but money that counts, specifically Hulu's ability to generate ad revenue while Google executives admit they are still looking for ways to monetize their online video mountain.

On the other hand, Hulu doesn't currently have the reach YouTube has or brand recognition, so it can't charge prime rates for video ads. YouTube's user generated video is of variable quality and could contain objectionable material, the sort of thing advertisers aren't going to support. There's also so much video posted on YouTube that Google doesn't have the resources to look through them all to find the ones that could fit within an advertiser's campaign.

Google is introducing better tools to track video metrics and let advertisers know when a video is about to "go viral" by measuring factors like the acceleration of views, favorites and rating activities. Hulu gets good marks for providing an ad selector to let viewers pick the ads they want

For more:
- TheStreet.com poo-poos YouTube and Hulu business models

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Hulu-abaloo

Sezmi unveils TV 2.0 Service

Doug Mohney — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:58:10 -0400

Sezmi -- stealth identity Building B – has gone public with its version of TV 2.0. It plans to offer a version of pay TV through phone companies, ISPs, and retailers. Pricing is supposed to be lower than cable or satellite with a better product. Trials are taking place in undisclosed pilot markets, but no information has been given on distributors or content providers or any details on pricing and availability.

On the other hand, the company has demonstrated a working version of the service with what appears to be production-ready CPE. There’s a set-top box for storing programs and a high-tech indoor antenna to pick up local digital TV channels. Some cable programming will be delivered over-the-air as well, using idle capacity at local TV stations and the rest will be delivered to the set top box through broadband.

Will it work? Others have tried to use digital TV broadcaster idle bandwidth capacity for data or video services, but efforts have not been successful. Sezmi thinks a thousand hours of on-demand video with a combination of time-shifted broadcasts and/or programs pushed to subscribers based on viewing preferences will be a viable alternative to broadcast TV viewing. Customized lists based upon each member of the household and prioritization based on time-of-day are other areas Sezmi hopes will give it a leg up. Advertisers will also get the benefit of highly documented profiles of viewers in order to offer targeted pitches.

For more:
- LA Times thoughtful piece on the Sezmi TV 2.0 announcement
- News.com’s skeptical Sezmi blog.

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Hulu-abaloo