BrightRoll Blog

By Tod Sacerdoti

Februray 28, 2010

As Peter Drucker once wrote, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an opportunity.” Put more simply, change is good . . . of course, that’s unless you’re trying to raise capital in these trying times.

After my company BrightRoll recently closed its Series B round of financing, we took a step back to digest the lessons we learned from pitching and negotiating with a handful of VCs over our 6-week fundraising effort.

To say raising money in the current economic environment has been different than it was two years ago is a massive understatement. Saying it’s night and day would be more accurate. As a year that was touched off by Sequoia’s now famous “RIP Good Times” presentation, 2009 was highlighted by massive layoffs, significant cost cutting and many well publicized company failures. As a result, many VC firms, and their portfolios, are now fraught with uncertainty—walking a fine line between licking their wounds thanks to poor fund returns and looking for new opportunities to improve their fortunes as the market recovers.

To read the rest of the post, visit TechCrunch

By Lewis Rothkopf

February 23, 2010

I’ve spoken at length about both the radical and advantageous ways in which video ads can vary from their television counterparts. While some advertisers are embracing the many benefits our medium offers in the areas of targeting, analysis and interactivity, many still are not.

It is, of course, easier and less expensive (in the upfront) to repurpose a 30-second TV spot, but that golden opportunity to talk to your target customers where they live is unfortunately lost.

So what are the options? At the most basic level, advertisers can create a digital-specific component as part of their campaign — and keep it to 15 seconds to achieve the greatest distribution. Interactivity layered on top of the pre-roll is even more interesting. But what if we began to have a true real-time conversation with our consumers — and do it live?

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost

We recently announced that we are larger than Hulu in video viewership as measured by Quantcast. This is an important milestone for the company and for the online video advertising business.

Here is the raw data:

Here is why this is important:

1. We Only Serve Video Ads. Hulu Serves Video Content And Ads. Yes, we are comparing apples and oranges — if you compared our reach to the reach of Hulu’s ads, there would be a much larger difference between our two networks. Agencies and advertisers often forget that the reach of a site is irrelevant, the only metric that matters to them is the reach of the site’s available ad inventory. As the gap between our network and Hulu continues to grow, it will become more and more clear that the most efficient way to reach targeted video audiences at scale are through video advertising networks.

2. TV Everywhere? More like Video Ads Everywhere. Although there has been a lot of press recently about TV Everywhere, the reality is that online video advertising will be far larger than online television. Why? Because online video advertising is being used by premium publishers to monetize all free content — including broadcast video, short form video, games, radio, social apps — and many of those publishers have much more reach outside of their video content area than within it. Plus, many premium publishers don’t have huge production costs outside of their broadcast content, so advertisers are flocking to more cost efficient placements.

3. By The End of 2010, The Majority of the Top Ten Video Properties Will Be Networks. As I recently predicted in MediaPost, this is beginning of what will be a long trend of networks and aggregators surpassing the largest video properties in total reach. By the end of 2010, the majority of the top 10 video properties (as measured by Quantcast, comScore or your preferred third party) will be video companies that don’t produce any meaningful amount of video content. This means the top 10 properties will be dominated by video ad networks (BrightRoll), video-sharing sites (YouTube), video syndicators (Grab Networks) and vertical video sites (Break.com). Yes, some of these players produce some content, but the vast majority of the views on their properties are generated from content they did not produce.

We look forward to continuing to lead the industry and driving innovations across our platform, pricing, targeting and research initiatives. If you share our passion about video advertising, please reach out or join our team.

By Tod Sacerdoti

January 18, 2009

It seems everyone in the online media business is bullish on the prospects for online video in 2010. This enthusiasm stems from the large market size, aggressive growth, quick rebound from the recession and the large number of profitable businesses that have been created in the category. However, few folks have been willing to put a stake in the ground with their predictions for 2010.

To read Tod’s predictions, visit MediaPost

By Lewis Rothkopf

December 21, 2009

In Silicon Valley, there’s an old adage that says all great internet companies eventually build an e-mail service. Nearly every major player from Google to Comcast, Facebook to MySpace, Yelp to LinkedIn, has some form of user-to-user e-mail within its site or application. Today, I propose a new maxim — all great internet companies eventually build (or buy) an ad network.

The evidence is inescapable: Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Fox, CBS, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Cox and many more all have networks of ad placements. In fact, even Forbes.com, the single most vocal publisher about the negative impact of ad networks, launched the Forbes Audience Network in late 2007.

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost

By Tod Sacerdoti

December 10, 2009

Lately, I’ve been looking into the evolution of successful Internet companies. How did they succeed? Which factors were the game-changers for them? Earlier, I wrote an article that addressed a few of these issues, where I dove into why many successful Internet companies build or buy an ad network.

Being in the online video business, I began to wonder: Is the same true for video networks? I think the answer is yes.

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost

By Tod Sacerdoti

November 10, 2009

In Silicon Valley, there’s an old adage that says all great internet companies eventually build an e-mail service. Nearly every major player from Google to Comcast, Facebook to MySpace, Yelp to LinkedIn, has some form of user-to-user e-mail within its site or application. Today, I propose a new maxim — all great internet companies eventually build (or buy) an ad network.

The evidence is inescapable: Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Fox, CBS, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Cox and many more all have networks of ad placements. In fact, even Forbes.com, the single most vocal publisher about the negative impact of ad networks, launched the Forbes Audience Network in late 2007.

For the purpose of this piece, I am defining an ad network as a product that connects advertisers with properties that want to run advertisements (websites, applications, etc.), typically with some form of automation and advanced targeting (site, user or geographic).

To read the rest of the post, visit AdvertisingAge

By Lewis Rothkopf

October 26, 2o09

In recent months, the video ad market has generally been rewarding those publishers who 1) have high-quality, branded content; 2) have a significant amount of inventory; and 3) are willing to be reasonably aggressive with their CPM rates in exchange for larger budgets.

I am often approached by publishers who want to grow video ad revenue and are willing to be flexible on pricing in order to get there. The challenge they sometimes face is that their amount of available inventory doesn’t justify the CPMs at which they need to sell in order to remain competitive.

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost

By Tod Sacerdoti

October 19, 2009

Given the power and success of Google’s CPC search business model, it’s not surprising that the products du jour in online video advertising are performance pricing, CPE, CPV, and CPC. At the same time, advertisers are feeling the effects of the economy and are showing a greater interest in measurable ad spends. However, like all online media tools, the devil is in the details (or in this case, the acronyms).

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits and downfalls of each of these online video advertising pricing units.

To read the rest of the post, visit iMedia

By Tod Sacerdoti

October 5, 2009

I was recently on a panel discussing online video advertising, and a fellow panelist proclaimed “reach is not a problem for us, as we reach 115 million people according to comScore.”  This statement is factually incorrect.

To accurately reflect his company’s reach, the panelist should have said, “We can potentially reach 115 million people.” According to comScore’s methodology, in order reach those 115 million people, the network would have to buy every ad impression on every publisher they work with. Furthermore, only those publishers with more than 2% reach are verified to have an actual business relationship with the network.

(full disclosure — comScore began measuring my company on both actual reach and potential in April, 2009)

As with most misleading metrics, potential reach was likely created to help sell something. ComScore wanted to sell large annual subscriptions to video ad networks and video ad networks wanted a big reach number to sell advertising and compete effectively against the large display ad networks. The metric has fundamentally served its purpose – all video networks are paying customers and many video networks’ actual reach is large enough to compete with the large display networks — and as such, it is time to put this metric to rest.

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost