Monetizing videos is a challenge that HyveUp is flirting with since it has become a stand-alone company. The choice is wide: Revver, Brightcove, Videoegg, and even Adsense for Youtube’s videos. They all have great services, but video is not yet the best revenue-generating medium, because it definitely lacks an ad service completely dedicated to placing the right ad for the right viewer in the right video in a right fashion. CTR and videos are not best buddies yet.
Last Saturday, I walked to downtown San Francisco to interview Mark Trefgarne, Founder/CEO of LiveRail. Think of LiveRail as the DoubleClick for videos. As Mark mentions in the video, DoubleClick already serves ads for videos, but their technology has been built for banner ads from the ground up. DoubleClick’s video weakness is LiveRail’s strength.
LiveRail is for ad networks, publishers and publishing platforms. It offers a compelling ad serving technology, along with an unobtrusive ad insertion solution (see example at the end of the video). LiveRail doesn’t have an ad sales team. Their focus (at least for the moment) is to fine-tune their ad serving technology, optimize their targeting tools, and enable ad insertion in any given video player out there.
Online video is an ever-growing medium. As we have seen recently between Youtube and TiVo, TV content and Web videos are slowly converging to form a whole. This convergence will happen if someone’s there to facilitate the shift to the online medium. LiveRail wishes to provide the solution for this emerging need.
More info about Liverail:
ReadWriteWeb: LiveRail Video Ads – One Month Out
Mashable: LiveRail is a Video Ad Distribution Network
Webtvwire: LiveRail Advertising | The Future Of Online Video Advertising? (recommended)