OK, this article in Wired about Google wasting (ok, spending) money at the DNC and RNC conventions this month and next caught my eye. Not because, as usual, Google is attracting people by giving away freebies, but because they are allowing the proletariat to upload videos live during the convention. And, they didn’t call us to put ads on them. I don’t think that these intrepid bloggers can live on smoothies alone.

The problem here is that since Google are making a billion or so dollars every hour (oh, wait, that’s Exxon), they can afford to give away great tsotchkes and therefore get invited to these places. I’m not worried though, I think our time will come

- Jayant Kadambi

Well, the venerable Ad Age recently wrote an article commenting on a study by Jupiter that pre-rolls actually don’t hurt customers. Not to pick on Ad Age, (OK, I will), but what seems prima facie to be a reasonable article that pre-rolls really do work, and customers are not driven away and the sky won’t cave in and bludgeon your website to death because you had the audacity to run a pre-roll which many, including this magazine, some ad networks, Google/Youtube and others have simply railed against seems like a 100% about face to me.

After spending the last year pontificating and letting others pontificate about the horrid pre-roll and in-stream ads interrupting viewers and the like, when all the evidence points against it, (at least in premium content), at best didn’t help the situation, and at worst added to the confusion in the video ad marketplace.

To be positive about it, it’s great to see “research” point to what we have written on these pages as being obvious. Publishers should be able to monetise their video using whatever ad inventory or ad type suites their content. Advertisers should be able to use existing creative assets and run them on publishers and networks that can figure out what will work where, when and how. Maybe we can now all get to work running ads instead of arguing about pre-rolls.

- Jayant Kadambi

Our VP of Ad Operations, Bob Bahramipour was on a panel on Monday at SES in San Jose. After the panel he was interviewed by Mike McDonald, pretty interesting discussion… check it out.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

- Lynn

I am happy to report that comScore released its Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for July 2008 and YuMe remains within Media Metrix’s AdFocus ranking at #8 with 136 million unique visitors.  Over the past couple weeks we have addressed comScore’s concerns and are happy with this resolution and with their decision to enhance how they report ad networks by providing two sets of numbers – “potential reach” and “actual reach.”  Video ad networks are very different than traditional banner networks, so we are continuing to work with comScore to determine the best way to account for video ad network traffic and the various unique ad formats supported – interactive overlays, watermarks, etc...  At the end of the day we just want to make things as transparent as possible for media buyers and planners and to help facilitate an apples-to-apples comparison between YuMe and other video ad networks.

- Molly Glover Gallatin

Yesterday’s IAB announcement about the growth of ad networks had an interesting statement: “Interviews with online publishers, …, indicate that the lack of adequate pricing tools and inventory management discipline contributed to the growth in available ad space. This is causing publishers to seek out ways to sell large inventories of unsold ads.”

I’m sure the IAB study was generally talking about the display space. But as we’ve been saying on these pages for a while, if inventory management is difficult in the display space, it’s a disaster waiting to happen in the video space. Think about it. On a web site, inventory management is not that hard. Website ad inventory doesn’t change that frequently, or if it does, it is carefully changed, with lots of analysis of where the content should be, where the 300×250 ad should be located, where the skyscraper and leaderboards should be (above the fold, below the fold, etc.).

Once the site is created, it’s a matter of figuring out how many visitors (uniques and in total) are coming to the site. Inventory forecasting is limited to maintaining a database of the particular ad units, cataloguing them and forecasting the audience based on the last 30 days of traffic or some seasonal event.

Now, I’ve exaggerated the simplicity of the display world to make a point, but in the video world, things get much harder. The content is not static; it is syndicated to multiple sites, distributed in multiple formats. There are a myriad of ad formats and there is the fact that the syndication may be uncontrollable at times, at least in terms of the viewership. Add to this to the fact that the ad inventory itself is dynamic (maybe a pre-roll is better than an overlay for a particular piece of content), this becomes an issue that needs to be addressed by video ad networks.

One unrelated point I’ll make is that I will take a bit of issue with the point made in the article about lower CPMs from ad networks. Yes, in general, that’s probably true, even in the video space, but with the right ad management system or platform, content transparency, technology and automated optimisation systems, it need not be true all the time. I’ll save that topic for another day.

- Jayant Kadambi

It’s quite amazing (even if I do say so myself) to look back and see the changes at YuMe over the past year. We opened the company for business in March 2007 and in a little over a year, we’ve grown our little business to be the biggest little video ad network and platform in the US. Given the huge available opportunity in the nascent video space and realising that this space is growing rapidly, we’re extremely excited to announce the addition of Michael Mathieu to the team as CEO.

We believe we are at the cusp of building something special here at YuMe and a large part of that is the team. Michael is a great addition to the team and culture here at YuMe and we look forward to building on our leadership position in this market.

- Jayant Kadambi

Our CEO, Jayant Kadambi, was on a panel at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford last week, along with panelists from Revenue Science, Clickable, Tremor Media and Peer39. The panel “A Thousand Little Googles – Bridging the Eyeball Gap” was a pretty interesting discussion. Topics ranged from the general online economy to video, behavioral targeting and innovative ad products.  If you’re interested, check out the session here:

http://alwayson.goingon.com/page/display/28097?param=session/311

- Lynn

There has been a lot of confusion over the past week regarding our ranking in comScore, so hopefully the following will provide some clarity. comScore released their June Media Metrix data, which includes the AdFocus rankings, on July 16^th. This release incorporated all of our recently signed publishers, including Microsoft, showing us at #8 with 134 million unique visitors. We drafted a press release, that comScore approved after a week of back-and-forth edits, highlighting our new ranking, which we sent out after comScore’s release went out with these same data points on July 21^st. Subsequent to comScore issuing their release, they decided to revise YuMe’s ranking to #32 with 59 million unique visitors. Still a great number and ranking, but unfortunately they did not notify us prior to doing so and we were not provided the opportunity to both understand and address their concerns.

While I agree that a unique visitor number is not the most ideal metric for a video ad network, this is still the metric that 95% of the ad agencies wish to have. And, although our primary focus is serving ads within a video player, we also serve video into banners as well. And remember – like for every property in the AdFocus report – this is a measure of YuMe’s potential reach given all the sites that have signed-up and joined our network, not our actual reach on a given month. There are two metrics that currently indicate the strength of an ad network: total potential reach (how many unique users you reach) and ads served. AdFocus concentrates on the first one.

We understand that a unique viewer would be a more ideal metric, but no reporting firm that I am aware of currently has a means to accurately and fully measure a video ad network. We have been working with comScore over the past year to determine how best to reflect YuMe within VideoMetrix, but unfortunately we are not quite there yet. For example, we support multiple types of ad formats, like interactive overlays, which VideoMetrix currently doesn’t track.

So, where does this leave us? After speaking with comScore and understanding their concerns, we have provided them with additional documentation that will hopefully alleviate these concerns. We are working closely with comScore to resolve how we are reported in MediaMetrix and I am hopeful that we will come to a resolution that works for the both of us. I just want to make sure that comScore applies the same standards and measurement rules to YuMe as they do to all entities reported in MediaMetrix.

- Molly Glover Gallatin