YuMe welcomes a great addition to our music channel: Baeble Music.  Baeblemusic.com is a destination for fans of live music concerts – visitors can check out online videos of the hottest bands playing at the best venues around the country.  Baeble’s community of twenty-something music enthusiasts view concert footage, review shows and compile band profiles for emerging acts such as: The New Pornographers, Blond Redhead, Ben Kweller, The Bravery, Shout Out Louds.   In addition, Baeble Music distributes the shows through Youtube, Imeem, Veoh, Vuze, Blinkx, Babelgum, as well as key music destinations on the web.

- Rosanne Lee Vathana

So I’m sure many of you have read about the recent influx of how-to video sites like 5min.com, wonderhowto.com, expertvillage.com and videojug.com. The concept is simple and there is certainly an audience for this type of content. But these niche sites are being funded by VCs, which means they’ll eventually have to become bonafide money-making businesses. They need a way to monetise these videos so people around the world can fine-tune their do-it-yourself 5-minute skills. What is the most likely way to do that, you ask? Maybe I’m a little biased, but it seems the most obvious way would be – you guessed it - through relevant contextual adverts inserted into, over or around the content.

Targeting has always been important in advertising. But just because the site is niche, micro-niche or even nano-niche (such as targeting people who are interested in learning how to patch a hole in a wall, hold a 6-month-old or even make the coolest origami paper airplane) doesn’t necessarily mean advertisers will flock there. The content must be useful to the targeted audience. The trick, though, is to reach those audiences in aggregate. With hundreds of micro-niche and nano-niche sites popping up, it’s unlikely that any will have YouTube’s reach. Advertisers don’t want to have to search through 500 niche sites looking for the perfect audience – maybe the 30-something homeowner who would be interested in the products on special at Home Depot. These advertisers need aggregation and transparent targeting.

To improve the reach, many of these sites are syndicating their content across different sites, such as blinkx, blip.tv, veoh, youtube, and others. We hope the site operators retain their advertising rights. Here at YuMe, we can hyper-target their content in aggregate and deliver meaningful reach to a very valuable audience. Because we have a large network of sites for which we’ve integrated advertising insertion, we also can help syndicate that content. As the largest dedicated online video ad network, we’re delivering million of ads. That means we’re also delivering millions of videos. For the micro-site, that increases the reach. For the advertiser, it translates to additional value. That’s what I call maximizing the niche.

- Jayant Kadambi