Adap.tv posts - Webware

June 28, 2007 9:55 AM PDT

Advertising is an important part of the Internet, but how are content creators and advertisers going to come together to start making money off videos? At Under the Radar this morning four new Web 2.0 advertising companies that specialize in video are trying to figure that out.

Adap.tv is an online video advertising platform that looks at the context of a video to place advertisements. Almost like Google's contextual AdSense program, Adapt.tv reads a video's metadata to figure out what the video is about before serving up an ad that (hopefully) is related. Ads pop up in a small transparent bar on the bottom of a video while it's playing.

Rafe took a look at Adap.tv last week at Supernova. There's also a demo of it on their site.

ScanScout is another service that inserts ads into videos. Like Adap.tv, ScanScout will insert a small transparent toolbar on the bottom of a playing video, along with a video link right inside it. Once users click it, it will pause the video they're currently watching and "pop-up" yet another video. The service can also insert ads before and after a video clip.

In addition to inserting ads on context, it will also look at the genre of a video to pull up similar ad videos. In this case, the example video of a man talking about mittens for kittens brought up a Flight of the Concords clip.

XLNTads is creating their own network that pays people to create video ads. It's funded by companies, who create "challenges" for XLNTads content creators to make ads for an ad campaign.XLNTads provides brand logos and related media items, and the users do the rest. The winning videographer gets the partial rights to their ads, along with future revenue earnings. It's essentially an ad agency that's attempting to tap into freelance video creators to do all the work.

YuMe (pronounced "You-Me") is an advertising company that's focusing on serving up localized ads for videos based on location. Similar to some text ads you might have seen while surfing the Web that include your city name, YuMe is attempting to do the same thing with video advertising. One of their examples was an ad for airline tickets in three different cities. The airfare to the same location from three different areas were different prices instead of one generic pitch.

For a live stream of the presentation, check our our friend Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome.com, who judged the event.

Topics:: Social network and groups,; Audio and video

Tags:: UTR Media,; Adap.tv,; ScanScout,; XLNTads,; YuMe,; ads,; advertising,; Google,; Video

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June 20, 2007 2:26 PM PDT

The future of video ads: Text

by Rafe Needleman

1 comment

I just got a very interesting demo from Adap.TV CEO Amir Ashkenazi. His company has built an online video-advertising technology that ignores one of the old maxims of advertising: that advertisements should be in the same medium as the content they are running in.

Adap.TV places text ads in videos. When a user clicks on one of these text come-ons, the video pauses and a new window opens on the ad's Web page.

It's a smart strategy, because there are a lot more text and Web ads for the system to chose from than there are video ads, and the experience for the Web user is less obnoxious than other embedded video-advertising schemes, including preroll, postroll, and in-place permission-based video ads.

Adap.TV currently uses the Looksmart text ad network as its source of ads. It also reads in the Amazon catalog and can match products to videos that are playing. The system is completely automated--it uses both metadata (tags and links) as well as video analysis (speech-to-text and scene change detection) to determine the ads to place and where to insert them.

When you click on the text ad under the video, the player pauses and opens the ad link in a new window.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In the screenshot is a sample of what the system does at its best, from the Spiderman video game promo that's up on MetaCafe (the ads don't seem to appear on the video when it's embedded, which is interesting).

Adap.TV isn't universally brilliant, though. On a user-submitted music/travel video I tried, it popped up seemingly out-of-context ads. I got a "Locate people for free" promo at about 1:24 in this video of pretty sunsets.

The system monitors performance of the ads it chooses and refines its choices based on what users are--and are not--clicking. So, hopefully, other users won't see the bad ad that I did.

For the past month, Adap.TV ads have been served on four channels of MetaCafe (Travel, Video games, Music, and Sports). MetaCafe has not yet increased its payouts for publishers whose videos get the ads, but the Adap.TV platform has increased the site's revenue per video, Ashkenazi told me. Other partnerships are in the works.

People who want to embed the Adap.TV technology on their own site can get code from the company to do so. Ashkenazi says it takes about an hour to integrate it into a video site (I did not test this). The advantage to doing this, of course, is that all the advertising revenue from the Adap.TV ads will then flow directly to the publisher.

The way Adap.TV puts text ads into videos is very smart. We haven't yet seen, though, what Google/YouTube will settle on for its video monetization strategy. For all we know, Google may settle on Adap.TV.

See also: VideoEgg, ScanScout, and Revver.

Ashkenazi will be presenting at the SuperNova conference this week and at Under the Radar next week. You can this online coupon to get $100 off admission: