Abhishek Tiwari

Comscore recently published metrics validating Google’s lead position (21.5%) in the online video market. Well, no surprises there, especially with them acquiring the YouTube property.

The release also stated that 3 out of 4 internet users streamed video in May. That stat clearly reflects the success of video as a medium and the penetration rate within subscriber community. Online video primarily has been used for entertainment. You know people ghostriding or watching lonelygurl15.

The question is, “now what?”. Monetizing video and actual usage of video as mode of general content consumption are still not ubiquitous. Let’s talk about monetization for now. I will cover the content consumption problem in a later post.

One would have expected to see embedded ads in the video we consume. LonelyGurl15 would have been a millionaire if a clean, seamless ad model existed. As Nick Gonzalez says (on TechCrunch), there are many start-ups tackling this problem, but no one has nailed it. The problems are:

• There is no a perfect model yet (pre, post, embedded etc)
• User content is unpredictable and in some cases unfiltered. Advertisers are not sure about associating their brand with such content

In my opinion a perfect video ad model should include following elements:

• Context Sensitive
  • This one goes without saying.Video ads must relate to the content at hand. Text ads have done a great job, but we are yet to see videos be as effective.
  • Frame tagging and other methods must be employed to make better sense of the data within video to gain context data
  • Innovative ideas like voice tagging can be employed as well using the audio components within the video stream to make more sense of the video
  • Not to mention the fact that such intelligence allows ad publishers to better choose content to be associated with versus shooting in the dark.
• Unobtrusive
  • We haven’t yet fully solved this problem on text ads yet, but we are getting close. Video ads have to do this even better. Text (or even image) ads can be ignored to some extent if they become noisy. Videos are hard to ignore and hence this problem is much severe.
  • Publishers should adopt ideas like digital watermarking of video or interstitial display of ads to ensure that the users don’t turn away from the content.
  • I personally hate the ads on CNET, which I have to watch before I can get to the real video. Don’t punish your users. Leverage them and the content at hand.
• Revenue sharing
  • This one is straight-forward. Many companies are trying this already. It is only logical that video sites start paying users for posting content.
  • By introducing creative “Pay per Play” models companies can really garner a creative user base and extract most value from the long term phenomena.
  • I also think that revenue sharing is an automatic method of content control. Users will not publish content that is questionable if money is on the line. People think differently when it comes to money.

I am really hoping that a company can emerge as the leader in such an ad distribution model. I personally don’t believe that it will be one of the video sites. It will be an ad company which can offer unique products to the overall community at large and allow video sites to innovate on op of that. Hence you see the success lies in enabling a platform versus creating your own video site.

So whoever gets there first wins. Well my bet is on Google. Let’s see who can beat them. It will be interesting to watch.

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