Blinkx AdHoc a Strong Alternative to Video Ad Insertion

Looking to squeeze a bit more advertising into your shared video offerings. Blinkx has a new easy solution, but does it work?

Blinkx is taking a different approach to their video advertising network. They are auto inserting contextual advertising into the shared embedded video from other hosting sites like YouTube, Revver, and Veoh. The process is so simple. You sign up for an account, which only requires your email address, a password and your paypal email. Then copy and paste the embed code from your favorite video hosting site and presto, Blinkx gives you a new embed code that will drive their advertising. You can choose to have the ads float over the top of the video or above video all together.

Blinkx states that the ads come from a variety of third party advertising networks providing CPM, CPC and CPA advertising, as well as Blinkx's own advertiser network which offers cost-per-click starting at $0.05. They don't say how much of that will end up with the publisher, but we'll find out and let you know in a future post.

On testing, no advertising was presented and it seemed to really slow down the video serving. Of the hosting sites tested only Stage6's embed code failed to sync with Blinkx's processes. Below are examples of the same video hosted on different sites displaying Blinkx advertising.

YouTube:

Revver:

Veoh:

If you notice any bugs when these videos stream, please leave a comment.

Two Big Changes in the World of Video Advertising

So this was a big weekend for online advertising. On Friday Revver announced the start of their pre-roll CPM ad delivery program, and over the weekend Google opened its CPA network to more users including the T-Cast Network.

For those of you who don't know what all the acronyms are all about, don't worry we were all there at some point. CPM is "cost per 1000 impressions" meaning it pays the publisher every time its seen 100 times. CPA is "Cost Per Action" meaning it pays the publisher when the viewer clicks the ad, goes to a site and completes some action. CPA pays better but is harder to convert, while CPM pays poorly but consistently.

Sites like AtomFilms have been using pre-roll ads for years, but with viewer attention spans so soft, Revver went with the video first approach. Pre-roll CPM changes all that.

Revver's pre-roll CPM program is a divergence from its traditional business model and they are going to great lengths to insist that the ads will remain non-obtrusive. The plus side is producers will now be paid every time their video is played (albeit a small amount), this is good news because well over 50% of the time viewers don't watch the video to the end and therefore never see the ad. Hopefully this new product will prop up producer's falling earnings on the network.

Google has been pilot projecting their referral or CPA ad network for years with products like Adsense, Adwords and Firefox, but has now expanded to an impressive array of products to promote on publisher sites.

One major problem with CPA networks like AzoogleAds.com and RockitProfit.com is that promotions are localized geographically and rarely allow international traffic. Google's CPA network takes care of that and provides a rotator for the ads repeated visitors are exposed to different ads. Many offers pay for people signing up for a free account on photo-sharing and dating sites.

Payments on Google's Adsense content network have bottom out making it hard for publishers to continue to run CPC context sensitive ads. Now with the improved Revver and Google ad programs, producers of original video content can monetize their traffic more successfully...or at least that's the promise.

There are some noticeable holes right off the bat. Revver is its classic form launched its program without updated analytics so producers will have no idea how many pre-roll ads are shown or how much of their money is coming from the CPM ads. Not all videos are used for the program, videos under 30 seconds are understandable not used, but no other details are given for video selection.

The Google Referrals network has a bit of a weak interface, the ads lack variety in their creatives, and the ads seem to pay slightly lower than other CPA networks.

Still big changes all around, Revver still hasn't had to content with Google directly, but that day will come. Google's own pre-roll video ad network is known to be in small scale testing, likely several years away from launching to the masses of producers.

Revver the next Google purchase, or maybe Stage6?

Google has build an empire on buying up the best innovations and integrating them into a vast advertising network. Providing free content and making billions for it. In a lot of ways Revver has what Google wants, a better player, CPC based auto insertion ad technology, and a pile of copy-right responsible content.

At T-Cast, we like the Revver model and wish them success. But there are problems with the things as they are. There is still no analytic reporting for video syndication and the revenue from those clicks is not broken down for either the syndicator or the content producer. Value of clicks are falling, but then are still better than most of the adwords content market with pay-per-click of $0.12 to $0.27.

It would seem to be smarter for the content producer to sell their own advertising, and the T-Cast producers asked Stage6's Divx support team for just such an opportunity only to be disappointed with the response. No question that the Divx authoring software is the best encoding software out there for under $50, and the Stage6.com site has proven that the player is post-roll clickable. Content producers could be running their own advertising campaigns off a wide variety of CPC, CPM and CPA advertising networks, and Divx HD quality video would be everywhere. Stage6 could be Revver for the masses.

Google needs to figure this out or it could get away from them. And there are other divx encoders out there. One of these companies has to put internet video syndication and dynamic advertising together before some hacker does.