New Inline Video ads on YouTube

GigaOm network’s NewTeeVee.com is reporting about a new format of video ads being tested on Youtube in what seems to be the best and smartest effort in monetizing the video sharing social network since Google acquired it.

As can be seen in this screen shot, a text ad is placed below a playing video which can be clicked to pause the playing video and play the video advertisement. The good thing is, viewing the ad is solely the user’s discretion and the ad can also be played once the video has been entirely watched.

I can not see the ads here yet, I am guessing that they may either be geo-targeted or google might just be testing them for now.

NewTeeVee also notes that ads are not displayed when a youtube video is embedded to a web page outside of youtube.

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LOL - new Mac Vs PC ad

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Centernetworks offering free advertising in exchange for a video about your startup

Popular blog about all things web 2.0, CenterNetworks, is making an offer startups can’t refuse - you can now promote your startup idea and be talked about at the blog for free.

All startups will need to do is to make a video pitching the startup, the benefits, why do you think it’s going to be the next big thing, etc., and send it to the Centernetworks. In return, Centernetworks will post the video on their blog, review and write about your startup - which has to be less than 2 years old and not a public company to qualify.

Finally, all the videos will go through a competition, a panel of judges will select be best video, the creator of which will win a 2 month advertising slot (May/June) on CenterNetworks

[Via Press Release]

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Contextual Video advertising - YuMe Launches video ad network

Sam, over at costpernews just blogged about ScanScout - a service that, unlike other video advertising networks out there, displayes contextual ads in videos. Apparently, clickable ads are displayed at the bottom of the video player on the basis of spoken keywords and tags .

As I was reading the costpernews post, The RSS reader popped up a story on GigaOM about the launch of another contextual video ad network - YuMe. Which is probably the only competition to ScanScout as of now.

Unlike ScanScout, however, YuMe targets ads based on tags and metadata and this is not entirely automated - YuMe Staff actually screens user generated video before placing ads in there to ensure “Brand safety”.

Another very interesting feature they are boasting about is geo-targeting, advertisers can select exactly where there ads will be seen and can show different versions of the ad in different zip codes.

Online video advertising (and monetization) is getting real huge real quick, and IMO these two companies - ScanScout and YuMe have come up with some fantastic innovation.

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Video Startup Ooyala Wins Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge

A few months ago, e-retail giant and web-services provider amazon announced that they would pay $100,000 in cash and offer investment in any startup that makes the best use of amazon’s web services in their business model.

The Result is here!

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

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