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Posts Tagged ‘Brightroll’

Video ad network BrightRoll outreaches Hulu, closes $10M third round

BrightRoll co-founder and CEO Tod Sacerdoti — pronounced “satch er DOH tee” if you don’t speak Italian — has three reasons to be happy this week. First, video advertising network BrightRoll is, according to Quantcast’s stats, now bigger than Hulu in terms of reach to Internet-using humans. BrightRoll’s ads reach 53.3 million unique viewers a month, compared to the Hulu Network’s 31.6 million. (The Hulu.com site draws 20.7 million.)

Second,BrightRoll has scored $10 million in Series C financing led by Scale Venture Partners, bringing the company’s total venture funding to $16 million since its launch in July 2006. Previous investors True Ventures, Adams Street Capital and KPG Ventures also participated in the round. Rob Theis, Managing Director with Scale Venture Partners, has joined BrightRoll’s board of directors.

Wait, there’s more! BrightRoll also announced today that it has been profitable for nearly the entire last 12 months. Rather than burning through it, the company will use this round of financing to expand its technology platform, beef up worldwide advertiser and publisher operations, and hopefully increase its leadership position in America.

Sacerdoti told me in a long phone call today that it’s not just BrightRoll, it’s video advertising as a whole that’s taking off. “The biggest theme we’ve seen over the past 12 months,” he said, “is that video advertising is being served for any free content, not just video content. Anywhere someone can serve a video ad, you’ll see a video ad. Video ads are going to be much more broad than TV will be.”

That bodes well for video ad networks like BrightRoll, as well as its competitors such as YuMe and Tremor Media. The thing about video ad networks is, as an Internet user, you’re not really aware of their existence. You just see lots of video ads all over the place, without being told who’s serving them. “It’s like when you watch Project Runway,” Sacerdoti said. “You know you’re watching Bravo, but you don’t think about whether or not it’s Bravo that sold the ads. Often it’s not.”

“I think by this time next year the majority of the top five to ten video properties by any measure will be aggregator networks,” he said. “The best example for this is display advertising. They’re by far the largest in reach and spending — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and 10 ad networks make up the top fourteen. But what we’re seeing pretty clearly from the advertising community is that the preferred ad medium is video. All things considered, advertisers would almost always prefer to run a video to talk to their customers.”

Why is Scale putting $10 million into BrightRoll? “The online video ad market will grow to billions of dollars over the next few years by disrupting the $70 billion television ad market,” Theis said in a prepared statement. That’s three and a half times the size of Google’s annual ad revenue, and more than twice the total $30 billion online ad market. The most strategic Internet investments are those that compete not with other Internet businesses, but with the much larger amount of money still being spent offline.

[Photo: BusinessWeek]

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BrightRoll: Video Ad CPMs Are Down 37 Percent, But Ad Revenues Are Up 84 Percent

Online video ad rates keep coming down, but that could be a good thing. BrightRoll, a large video ad network, is reporting that cost-per-thousand (CPM) rates for pre-roll video ads across its network are down on average by 37 percent from a year ago, but total revenues across its network are up 84 percent. Cheaper ads are leading to more spending by advertisers overall.

The chart above shows average CPMs on BrightRoll’s network indexed to 100 at the beginning of 2008. The average CPMs are now in the mid-teens, and seem to be leveling off. They were down 4.5 percent from last quarter.

BrightRoll says online video advertising started a rapid post-recession comeback in the first quarter of 2009 (which is about when video platform company Brightcove starting seeing an uptick in business also).

The third quarter saw an acceleration video advertising. BrightRoll tracked a 46 percent increase in the number of video ad campaigns, compared to the previous quarter, 31 percent more advertisers, and a 64 percent increase in requests for proposals (RFPs). If BrightRoll’s data is indicative of the industry as a whole, online video advertising should remain a bright spot this year.

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LayeredBrain promises to triple your video ad revenues

With high speed Internet connections becoming widely available, the online video market is booming: 25 billion videos were viewed in September alone in the US, according to comScore statistics, twice as many as a year ago. This might get video-sharing site YouTube feeling all warm and cozy, dreaming about hitting break-even, but what about those people actually creating video content? When do they get to start seeing a profit? Romanian startup Brainient hopes to answer that question with its new video monetization platform, LayeredBrain, currently in beta testing.

LayeredBrain lets you add interactive elements to video content. For instance, if you have an iPod in your video, you can define a hotspot over it, attach a link to the product, and the link will automatically be converted to an affiliate link. The application supports around 7000 merchants and has access to over 65 million affiliate links so, unless you’re selling something really exotic, there’s a pretty good chance your product will be on that list. And if your videos feature the same product more than once, LayeredBrain will automatically detect and tag that product for you. The company’s developers are still playing with the detection technology, but they should have it in production within the next few months.

LayeredBrain also lets you create polls, cue points and chapter markers to guide viewers through the video, and add images or other elements on top of your video.

And if you’ve already got a favorite video-management platform, there’s not need to switch, since LayeredBrain can be integrated with other platforms such as Brightcove, Vimeo or a custom CMS, directly through an API. As far as advertising is concerned, you can set your own ad campaign, you can use the affiliate network or you can integrate ads from Doubleclick, Google Adsense or Brightroll.

LayeredBrain is not the only player on the interactive video advertising market. Innovid, an Israeli startup founded in 2007, focuses on placing interactive elements into videos for advertising purposes, two of their most spectacular features being the clickable canvas and the integration of 3D objects. However, Innovid doesn’t support integration with other video management platforms and with affiliate networks. Quick.tv is another competitor, UK based, that offers video advertising through interactive elements and also provides integration with popular video management platforms. Veeple, a US startup, provides a solution for embedding almost anything in videos — PDF or PPT files, audio and video files, hotspots and social icons. Veeple also has an auto-detection technology for tagged objects and has recently launched a free API for integration with third-party Flash Players and CMSs.

Emi Gal, CEO and founder of Brainient (pictured), says the main difference between LayeredBrain and its competitors is how the money is made. LayeredBrain provides integration with affiliate marketing links, besides offering the interactivity tools, which leads to a revenue stream three times higher than with regular video advertising, he says. Since this subject came up, I was curious to know just how much money a regular video can make.

Gal had some dazzling calculations in store: “If you run pre-rolls on your videos, charge a $30 CPM and get half-a-view per pre-roll, per video, that means you’re making on average 1.5 cents per video view. If you attach an affiliate link on top of that video, for an average purchase of $60, a 10% commission and a 0.5% conversion rate, it could bring you 3 more cents per video view. To sum up, we can triple a publisher’s revenue just by adding contextual affiliate links on top of the video.” 4.5 cents per video might not seem much, but if your video reaches 100,000 views, that’s $4,500.

For now, we’ll have to take Gal’s word for it, but for the next few months, he plans on getting enough traction to put together some case studies to prove LayeredBrain generates more money for publishers.

Launched just two months ago, LayeredBrain has already raised 100,000 euros from Seedmoney and Seedcamp and has a third round of investment in the pipeline. Brainient, the company developing Layered Brain, is also behind another video product, Veevid — an open source video management platform. Its R&D and technical support teams are based in Bucharest, and its sales and marketing teams are in London.

[Image credit: wall-street.ro]

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