Ooyala has been working on making the viewing experience more meaningful for online video consumers and more lucrative for online video publishers. The online video technology company recently integrated with a number of different ad servers and networks from YuMe Networks , Tremor Media , DoubleClick Inc. , AOL LLC 's Lightningcast, and Google's AdSense for Video that has support for both overlay as well as in-streaming companion ads, including pre-roll, post-roll, and mid-roll. Content owners can use their own ad networks or tap into Ooyala's integrated offering. Ooyala has also recently integrated Nirvanix, the premier "Cloud Storage" platform provider and its Storage Delivery Network(TM) (SDN) into their Backlot video management platform.Meliza Solan of Vator.tv posted this entrepreneur interview with Ooyala founders, Bismarck Lepe, Sean Knapp, and Belsasar Lepe, Bambi Francisco which she says, "dives into the future of online advertising. In the interview, Bismarck Lepe talks about how Ooyala plans to launch in the first quarter, a subscription capability for its clients."
In 2008, with about a billion dollars spent in online video advertising Ooyala sees the opportunities in 2009 moving more to a transactional "pay-per-play" subscription model which puts the control back in the hands of the online video consumer and gives online video publishers greater margins to monetize their content. In addition Ooyala is rolling out new ad serving platform with advanced planning, analysis, and management options which will enable another tier of networks, distributors, and content creators to operate more effectively.
Their tools give dynamic control over the content and how the ads are served which helps content owners better learn about the end users. Co-founder and CEO Bizmarck Lepe defines that Ooyala is primarily in the enablement business and said, "
"Everyone talks about behavioral targeting. Well I don't necessarily think behavioral targeting works very well in terms of creating a dynamic learning system if you can actually learn from what is causing a certain behavior. So what we do is we actually analyze the video as the video is going through and we extract meta information and then based on behavior we tie it back to what was actually happening on the screen. So if we notice that someone is always fast forwarding through ads whenever there are car ads and whenever they're watching a soap opera then we'll make sure that that mapping of ads to that type of content never happens again."
About going beyond the pre-roll and post-roll and where online advertising is going in 2009 Bismarck Lepe has this to say,
"So when we think about advertising, I think people have it all wrong. It should be about monetization. It's about figuring out what monetization model works best for content A and person B. If we know that an individual is actually very willing to purchase a piece of content, why should we bore them with that? They should have the ability to pay for that individual stream and pay 5 cents or pay 10 cents.Read the full transcript from the video here:
If you think about it. If you build a very simple, transactional model, where they click once and it's tied to their PayPal account, and they only pay 10 cents, over a thousand people that's a $100 CPM. So that's what we're exploring. Obviously, we're continuing to do the pre-roll and the post-roll and the overlays. And what we've found there is you need to make sure that the ad is compelling to the end user, the ad complements the content, but in a lot of cases it's actually better that you directly give the opportunity for the end user to pay for that piece of content."
VatorNews - Ooyala to launch transaction model for video
Online video monetization isn't just about ads, but pay-for-play
Related Vator News
From entrepreneur by Bambi Francisco
December 30, 2008
Ooyala founders: Sprint in the same directionLepe brothers and Sean Knapp share team hug and advice to entrepreneurs
Entrepreneur interview by Bambi Francisco
December 19, 2008
Ooyala is a video technology company that provides an integrated platform enabling the delivery, management, and monetization of high quality video content. Focused on innovation and scalability, Ooyala is committed to providing the most comprehensive video solutions to companies worldwide.Ooyala is headquartered in Mountain View, Ca with sales operations in New York, NY and London, UK.
Ooyala was founded in early 2007 by Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe and Bismarck Lepe - all former Google employees. While at Google, they worked on the development and launch of various monetization and content distribution products such as AdSense, AdWords and Google Web Search. After four years of engineering and product development at the biggest Internet company in the world, the three left Google to start Ooyala. Ooyala has raised over 10 million dollars in funding and has in excess of 5000 publishers using its syndication platform - Backlot. Ooyala's goal is to build a successful technology company that focuses on delivering the best video experience to video content providers, advertisers and most importantly consumers.
