Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	October 31, 2008

Looking to monetize your video-viewing audience? Check out these 9 popular online video advertising solutions.

If your site leverages online video, you might be interested to know which service you should use to monetize these videos. If you’re like America’s Test Kitchen, where most of your video content is behind a membership website, you’re already being compensated by your members.

However, if you’re a news website or are otherwise offering videos on your site as complimentary content, there’s no reason not to sponsor the video content with unobtrusive ads.

Here is a list of the 9 top online video advertising solutions that we’ve found publishers using (in alphabetical order):

Adap.tv: Adap.tv compiles ads from all the different ad networks and serves them in your videos. You can choose the most appropriate ad types and sources, set display frequencies and durations, and even insert ads from your own sales team. You must apply to Adap.tv to become part of their network.

• Premium advertisers: No
• Traffic-sharing: No
• Ad location options: Dozens
• Tracking: Detailed
• Targeting: Tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations determine the ads
• Setup time: 1-2 days (including application)

Blip.TV: If you upload your videos to iTunes in podcast or paid form, you might be interested in the recent announcement by Blip.TV saying that they can now serve up pre-roll, post-roll, and overlay ads using DoubleClick (a popular ad server) that have tracking capability within iTunes. Revenue from advertising is a 50/50 split and publishers can choose to use external ads or internal ads (self-serve interface coming soon).

• Premium Advertisers: No
• Traffic Sharing: Yes
• Ad location options: Pre-roll, post-roll and overlay ads
• Tracking: Only in iTunes store (not on devices)
• Targeting: Pick your own, let advertiser pick, or offer high-end sponsorships.
• Setup time: Depends on whether they’re external or internal ads.

KickApps: One of our favorite video ad solutions is the KickApps Hosted Video Solution. With this, you can create your own custom branded video players by inserting your logo, links or other content into your videos. Their free application is easy to use and lets you insert advertising (from Google and other major ad networks) wherever you want. It’s not as simple as uploading a video to YouTube, but offers you the most customization.

• Premium advertisers: No
• Traffic-sharing: No
• Ad location options: Pre-roll, post-roll, overlay ads (anywhere you want) or ad units around the video
• Tracking: Through ad network
• Targeting: Through ad network
• Setup time: Instant (with a little elbow grease)

LongTailVideo: We're big fans of LongTailVideo because they offer the most similar features to the paid video advertising solutions, minus the handholding. With LongTailVideo, publishers can embed an ad tag into their media players, allowing them to run pre roll or overlay mid roll and post roll advertisements in any language. You have the ability to track ads individually and monitor the performance of individual campaigns. This is a great solution for a site that wants to use its own ads within its videos.

• Premium Advertisers: No
• Traffic Sharing: Yes
• Ad location options: Pre-roll, post-roll, overlay ads
• Tracking: Yes
• Targeting: Run your own ads or use external ads targeted by content
• Setup time: Instant

Revver: Revver works on a 50/50 rev share model, but only offers ads at the end of videos. They also manually filter the content themselves to pick the most relevant ads to serve. They offer a Revver Wordpress plugin making them a great candidate for sites on Wordpress that want their own interactive video portal that allows video responses and internal tracking functionality.

• Premium Advertisers: No
• Traffic Sharing: Yes
• Ad location options: At the end of videos only
• Tracking: Yes
• Targeting: Hand-picked relevant ads
• Setup time: Instant

ScanScout: ScanScout helps monetize content by serving ads within the video stream. The ad units appear along the bottom of the video content (overlay) or below the video player controls (ticker). The overlay/ticker ad unit is non-intrusive, user-friendly and user initiated. ScanScout's in-stream ad solutions complement existing forms of pre and post roll advertising, enabling publishers to extract the most value from their video streams. Publishers get full control of ad elements, including ad timing, placement, and type. You must apply to ScanScout to serve their ads.

• Premium advertisers: Yes
• Traffic-sharing: No
• Ad location options: Along the bottom only
• Tracking: Advanced, real-time reporting
• Targeting: Video engine expertly monitors video content and serves relevant ads
• Setup time: 1-2 days (including application)
  
  

VideoEgg: VideoEgg works on a CPE (cost per engagement) model, meaning that you pay only when users engage with your video. Every video gets its own customizable popup that might offer a related product or special report, plus ways to share the video or otherwise engage your audience. On the other hand, if you’re looking to make money on external ads, then you’re the one getting paid when someone engages with a video. They work exclusively with Fortune 500 brands, so you won’t be getting any “free apple ipod” or “punch the monkey” ads. I’d recommend checking out the site to see what you can expect from them, it’s very different from any of the other online video advertising solutions you’ll find in this list.

• Premium Advertisers: Yes
• Traffic Sharing: No
• Ad location options: Everywhere (see VideoEgg.com for example)
• Tracking: Minimal
• Targeting: By demographic and context. If there is no premium ad to serve, you have the option to show Google Adsense.
• Setup time: 1-2 days for approval

YouTube: YouTube now offers you the option to collect your share of Google Adsense by allowing them to put advertising on the top of videos that you use on your site. The obvious added benefit is that you get traffic-sharing through YouTube’s 62.6 million users. If you’re looking to offer new video, you might be interested in Google’s Video Advertising Solutions, a collection of YouTube videos that you are free to use on your site and collect AdSense commissions on. If you’re interested in putting your own ads in external YouTube videos, you should check out YouTube’s InVideo Ads application.

• Premium Advertisers: No
• Traffic Sharing: Yes
• Ad location options: Top and Bottom
• Tracking: Minimal
• Targeting: By content
• Setup Time: Instant

YuME: Yume is #8 in comScore’s “ad Focus Ranking”. YuMe gives publishers the ability to insert the right ad into the right video content at the right time, then monitor and optimize performance to ensure maximum monetization. You must apply to YuMe to serve their ads. In terms of using YuMe for advertising, according to comScore, YuMe provides advertisers access to 400+ websites, over 500 million premium video streams, and 134+ million unique visitors per month, reaching 71% of the U.S. online population.

• Premium advertisers: No
• Traffic-sharing: Yes, YuMe’s proprietary tracking technology allows publishers to track, monitor and control the distribution and monetization of video content
• Ad location options: Pre-roll, Post-roll, player branding, InVideo text ads, Geotargeted Overlay, Interactive Overlay (see examples)
• Tracking: Detailed
• Targeting: Campaign targeting
• Setup time: 1-2 days (including application)

If you’re business has a large video advertising budget, there are online video companies that will easily host your videos and work with you to create trackable internal ads, like the very popular BrightCove or thePlatform.

We haven’t found any huge advantages to paying the big bucks for a video solution, besides relieving hosting costs (if you have lots of videos) and otherwise doing the dirty work for you (setting up ads, sending progress reports, building custom APIs when needed).

If you have a smaller budget, you might be more interested in the above services, all of which won’t cost you a dime but may take a little elbow grease.