We are committed to providing the most powerful video advertising technology for publishers, wherever and however they choose to publish their videos, so we are excited to announce that our ACE technology platform now supports Microsoft Silverlight. Check out what MediaPost and Beet.TV have about the news.
Starting today, publishers can ACE-equip their Silverlight players with our new Silverlight SDK. Publishers with ACE-equipped Silverlight players will be able to receive pre-, post- and mid-roll ads as part of our video ad network, and they will have the option to take control of their video inventory with the ACE Ad Management System—our set of cloud-based publisher ad operations tools.
We would like to thank IBN Sports for working with us as we finalized the Silverlight SDK. You can check out some great sports content in their Silverlight player at www.ibnsports.com.
We are excited to announce that Streaming Media has selected YuMe, along with 9 other companies, as the ten “most innovative, most important, and just plan coolest stuff in online video.” In addition to YuMe, others who made the list are: Amazon Cloudfront, BoinxTV, Encoding.com, Howcast, Kyte, Livestream, Netflix, Visible Measures and Winnov. Click here to read more about the top ten.
Thanks to some generous conference organizers, we’ve got some great ways to see Scot speak on the cheap:
The nice folks at Digiday have given us some free passes. If you’re interested in checking out the New York event on April 12th, or the San Francisco event on April 14th, shoot us an email at getresults@yume.com , and we’ll try to set you up with a pass.
Today we released our Video Ad Metrics Report for February 2010. This month’s report contains data on the ads we served from January 1st to February 21st of this year. Video ad performance is looking great in 2010.
We’ve beena littlebusy recently, so we did not include any new analysis in this month’s report. If there are any numbers that you’d like to see in our upcoming Q1 wrap up report, let us know at advertise@yume.com.
The following video is an exerpt from an interview Daisy Whitney of Beet.TV did with Jayant Kadambi at our roundtable last week, addressing the increasing shift of TV content to alternative distribution channels and the challenges advertisers are facing.
Below is a recap of the “top 3″ challenges advertisers are facing:
Scale - TV advertisers are use to buying audiences at scale, but currently it’s hard for an advertiser to spend a lot online because there is not just one place advertisers can go. YuMe is building enough of an audience to help advertisers shift more TV dollars to online video.
Data - Everyone says they want data, but there is so much data that can be provided that it can be overwhelming. We can tell the advertiser anything they want to know, but its better if we know what their goals are, so we can provide the data that is important to them - engagement, clicks, video completion rate, etc.. Measurement of a campaign and its effectiveness can be very different per advertiser.
Format - Daisy asked “Is there a consensus on the best format?” As Jayant points out, video has a time component, which lends itself to multiple format types. What YuMe likes to do is let the advertiser run the campaign the way they want, encouraging creativity and getting them to try different executions. YuMe can then adjust in real-time based on performance.
A lot great content from last weeks event, you can watch the entire re-broadcast here.
We’re sponsoring a roundtable discussion today about how publishers can make the most money from their video content. You can watch the live stream in the Ooyala player embedded in this post, or watch on Beet.TV’s special player page.
Kara Swisher from AllThingsD and Andy Plesser from Beet.TV will be moderating, and we have a fantastic group of speakers lined up:
Brian Buchwald, EVP, NBC Integrated Local Media
Gregg Colvin, VP of Business Development, Fox Interactive
John Evershed, Co-founder and CEO, Mondo Media
Karin Gilford, SVP, Online Media, Comcast Interactive Media
Jeff Jordan, Product Manager, Video Analytics, Omniture
Jayant Kadambi, Co-founder and President, YuMe
Bismarck Lepe, President of Product Strategy, Ooyala
Jim Louderback, CEO, Revision3
Keith Richman, CEO, Break Media
Grant Ries, Chief Revenue Officer, BlueKai
Marc Ruxin, EVP, Chief Innovation Officer, Universal McCann
Anthony Soohoo, SVP, Entertainment & Lifestyle, CBS Interactive
Jennifer Taylor, Director, Flash Content Creation + Distribution, Adobe
We are excited to announce that Michael Hudes—the former COO and President of Organic and President of Innovation Strategy and Growth at IPG’s Media Brands—has joined YuMe as our new Executive Vice President. At YuMe Michael will focus on corporate development, increasing the adoption of our video ad platform ACE.
Michael is no stranger to the video advertising space—he most recently served as CEO at Keystream, a technology company that focused on dynamic overlays.
We are very excited to announce that we have closed a $25 million round of funding today led by Menlo Ventures and including our existing investors - Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Joining our Board of Directors from Menlo Ventures is Shawn Carolan, who also sits on the board of Roku and has invested in IMVU, PlaySpan, PlayPhone and Siri. You can read all about our announcement in an article that appeared in today’s New York Times written by Brad Stone.
We had a great 2009, achieving significant revenue growth, reaching profitability and experiencing accelerated adoption of our video ad management platform “ACE.” Our ACE platform is unique in its ability to deliver qualified audiences at scale without wasting impressions, making publisher content more valuable and maximizing ad campaign performance for advertisers.
“Video is the largest advertising category on the planet and the shift from broadcast to Internet went into high gear in 2009,” said Shawn Carolan, Managing Director for Menlo Ventures. “As we evaluated all the video ad solutions on the market, we became convinced that YuMe has built the best technology in the industry in its ACE ad management platform, with its ability to optimize video advertising across all viewing environments, including IPTV, mobile and Web. The company already has demonstrated it is the market leader going into 2010 and this funding will help facilitate new technology offerings and additional expansion.”
Ever wonder what some of the biggest names in media, technology and marketing are thinking about the online video market? If so, next Wednesday, February 24th is your lucky day. We’re partnering with Ooyala, CBS Interactive and Beet.TV to produce a roundtable where senior executives from some of the biggest companies in our space will answer all of your questions.
Kara Swisher from AllThingsD and Andy Plesser from Beet.TV will moderate a wide-ranging discussion featuring executives from companies including Adobe, Comcast, NBC Integrated Local Media, and Fox Interactive Media (you can see the full speaker list here). The roundtable will run from 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM Pacific on Wednesday, February 24th. You can can watch the free Ooyala-powered livestream here.
This week we released our Video Ad Metrics Report for January 2010. This month’s report includes a full year’s worth of data on issues including the relative performance of of 15 and 30 second pre–roll units, and that age old question “who’s clicking on ads?”. In future reports, we plan to take a deeper look at how a campaign’s goals (branding, direct response, etc.), target demographic, and creative executions influence metrics like video completion and click-through rates.
Online video advertising is a new category, and everyone in the industry is still working to find the best ad formats, success metrics, and creative approaches. We believe that publishing the data we’re seeing will facilitate that process. If you have a question that you would like to see addressed in a future report, let us know at advertise@yume.com.
