Our friends from Google, a few miles south of us on the 101 hit the jackpot for several reasons, one of which was their allowing all advertisers, (but mainly small ones, and ones from SMBs) to sign up, login and start running text ads. Great idea. Let’s now all do it for video. Small issue though – It’s a few orders of magnitude harder to upload a video ad than to type in a 3 line text advertisement.

Also, since the availability of video content on ad networks is far, far less in terms of volume or impressions/streams, or whatever metric you want to use, it deosn’t work so well. The reason being even if we figured out how to get the video built, uploaded and targeted,  the next problem is that the target of the 94065 zip code or DMA would end up with a few hundred or a thousand people actually watching the video. In other words the ad network just isn’t big enough to get enough scale for this kind of SMB or small market video advertising.

Spotrunner tried their hand at it for the cable spot market by hiring dozens of people with green screens, G5 Macintoshes and video cameras. There are several companies, big and small, including Comcast (see article here) who are dipping their toe in this water and specifically pitching the fact that it will be easy to advertise online with video because there are great tools to make and upload ads and target the ads online.

Well, we support all these measures. And we think it’s a great opportunity to get the little guy the ability to advertise on video. We just think that doing it on a large network will afford more eyeballs than on a web-site or property-by-property basis. Maybe we should call Comcast.

- Jayant Kadambi

Could the writer’s strike in Hollywood be misguided and premature? In a Q&A with adage.com this week, former Disney chief Michael Eisner slammed the writers for walking off the job to pursue non-existent revenue. The state of online video is still feeling its way through some growing pains as business models start to shift from teenage hi-jinks on YouTube to professional, network quality broadcasts on a growing number of branded Web sites, including abc.com and NBC’s Hulu venture.

But what really struck a chord with us at YuMe were Eisner’s comments on the pricing structure – or lack of – for that entertainment. To drive down the pricing, the audience needs to grow. And to grow the audience, you need a distribution platform. Hmmm…sounds a lot like what we do here at YuMe.

“There are no gatekeepers,” Eisner said. “You don’t have to be on iTunes, you don’t have to be on Comcast. You don’t have to be on ABC. You don’t have to get approval of anybody. And eventually, advertisers are going to see the benefit of content that’s produced in a superior way, with better emotional hinges, and those people will have a good business.”

That makes sense to us. And as the builders of that platform, we’re ready to help advertisers and content publishers to take online distribution to that next level.

Jayant Kadambi