July 20, 2010

In 2009, I coined the term “The Golden 15″ to describe the four portals (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & AOL), the four broadcasters (ABC, CBS, FOX & NBC), the five cable conglomerates (Comcast, Disney, MTV, Turner & Viacom), along with Hulu, MySpace and Facebook.  Well, the Golden 15 are looking a bit bronze at the moment.

Why is this? First, comScore recently released its VideoMetrix 2.0 Preview for May, which provides an early look at the reach of advertising on all video sites. When measured by ad reach (as opposed to content reach) only three of the top 10 sites are Golden 15 publishers. Networks and aggregators have significantly scaled over the past 12 months and will no doubt dominate these reports for the foreseeable future.

Second, big initiatives like TV Everywhere have yet to come to fruition.  YouTube, the one exception, is continuing its gradual onslaught on the content business and recently hit the milestone of 2 billion videos viewed per day.  The other 14 publishers in the Golden 15 don’t even have 5 billion videos viewed per month!  At its most fundamental level, the business of online video requires technology innovation — and the slumbering giants are struggling to keep up.

To read more, visit MediaPost

June 21, 2010

On a recent flight to New York I had a chance to catch up on my reading, and a statistic in one magazine’s cover story hit me like a load of bricks: The median age of prime-time television viewers is nearing 51 years old.

I had to read it three times. 51 the median? This means that more than half of all prime-time viewers are outside of the golden demographic of 18-49. The medium that has long been synonymous with massive reach is quickly becoming the most efficient way to reach lots of old people!

Surprisingly, this shift has not been gradual — it’s been most pronounced over the past five years. In fact, the median age of prime-time viewers has increased by a year every year since 2005.This means that the rate at which young people are turning away from TV is greater than the rate at which old people are dying. Think about that one for just a second.

So what does this mean for traditional content owners?

To read more, visit MediaPost

June 3, 2010

The dirty little secret in the online video business is that almost no one has been able to crack the code when it comes to creating successful, recurring online shows. Yes, there are a few shows with millions of “followers” on YouTube and the occasional mini online celebrity. There are even some shows that have moved on to TV, but these have largely been failures. Essentially there have been no online-only shows that have been sustainable, multimillion-dollar successes.

What about branded video content, you ask? Not faring much better. With this model, you’re essentially trading analog GRPs (gross rating points) for sub-par digital placements. Ask anyone who’s not in the business of selling these shows to name a single show created by a publisher or an ad network on behalf of a brand. You will hear the crickets.

Why? Well, there are many reasons. In short, these shows lack real marketing budgets, massive distribution and access to embedded lead-in/crossover audiences, and the content is often weak or simply made for the sole purpose of extracting ad dollars from advertisers. As many have learned, creating a new show that builds a real audience from scratch is very difficult. Even the best in the TV business fail often in the process of launching a new show.

To read the rest of this post, visit MediaPost

April 26, 2010

One of the great privileges I have at BrightRoll is the opportunity to meet with incredibly interesting, talented people in the online video industry all the time. Of course, working in a common field gives us lots to talk about.

Many of us in this space, however, have long known that our industry possesses important parallels to other, seemingly unrelated fields. Studying and exploring current trends in these non-adjacent areas offers us the opportunity to learn lessons beyond those our own relatively young industry can teach us.

It’s with this thought in mind that I respectfully extend an open invitation to the following individuals:

To read whom Lewis wants to get lunch with, visit MediaPost

March 25, 2010

I first heard the phrase “Syndicated Video Economy” while eating lunch with Will Richmond, the founder of VideoNuze.  We were discussing how the distributed power of the Web would eventually produce many large online video businesses. While this turned out be true,  a black market has also emerged –  as in all big industries.

The syndicated video black market is dominated by a small number of video syndication firms, ad networks and tier-three publishers, all of which appear to be both codependent and increasingly unscrupulous.  I was disappointed over the weekend to receive an email from one of our lead engineers that demonstrated a cleverly hidden ad tactic previously seen only in the display world.

In this black market example, I was shocked to see not one, but six publisher sites appearing in invisible 1×1 pixels hidden behind a banner ad, serving video from a video syndication firm and multiple video ads from Coke, Verizon and others served by two video ad networks.

To read the rest of this post, visit MediaPost

March 21, 2010

In Silicon Valley, every startup fears than an established brand will one day acquire a rival or build a similar offering and instantly become the industry gorilla. When it comes to advertising, Google, which claims not only both the largest ad network and number of relationships with advertisers, but the most automated and profitable system on the Internet, is the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Ditto for Oracle and Cisco in the enterprise software space and eBay and Amazon in e-commerce.

Yet while fear of the 800-pound gorilla rightfully looms, upstart ad ventures can take heart in mounting evidence that suggests online ad categories are not cornered by deep-pocketed brands, but by new market entrants. This has held true across several different categories, including Google in search, DoubleClick in ad serving, Advertising.com in display, NexTag in CPA, RightMedia in exchanges and AdMob in mobile. Each of these companies emerged from humble beginnings to become billion-dollar businesses, and did so in the face of large, incumbent competitors. Additionally, a slew of other firms exited at valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, among them Overture (search), Atlas (ad serving), ValueClick (display) and Quattro (mobile), to name just a few.

To read the rest of this post, please visit GigaOm

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

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

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.