YuMe’s take2video Blog

Our CEO, Jayant Kadambi, was on a panel at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford last week, along with panelists from Revenue Science, Clickable, Tremor Media and Peer39. The panel “A Thousand Little Googles – Bridging the Eyeball Gap” was a pretty interesting discussion. Topics ranged from the general online economy to video, behavioral targeting and innovative ad products.  If you’re interested, check out the session here:

http://alwayson.goingon.com/page/display/28097?param=session/311

- Lynn

There has been a lot of confusion over the past week regarding our ranking in comScore, so hopefully the following will provide some clarity. comScore released their June Media Metrix data, which includes the AdFocus rankings, on July 16^th. This release incorporated all of our recently signed publishers, including Microsoft, showing us at #8 with 134 million unique visitors. We drafted a press release, that comScore approved after a week of back-and-forth edits, highlighting our new ranking, which we sent out after comScore’s release went out with these same data points on July 21^st. Subsequent to comScore issuing their release, they decided to revise YuMe’s ranking to #32 with 59 million unique visitors. Still a great number and ranking, but unfortunately they did not notify us prior to doing so and we were not provided the opportunity to both understand and address their concerns.

While I agree that a unique visitor number is not the most ideal metric for a video ad network, this is still the metric that 95% of the ad agencies wish to have. And, although our primary focus is serving ads within a video player, we also serve video into banners as well. And remember – like for every property in the AdFocus report – this is a measure of YuMe’s potential reach given all the sites that have signed-up and joined our network, not our actual reach on a given month. There are two metrics that currently indicate the strength of an ad network: total potential reach (how many unique users you reach) and ads served. AdFocus concentrates on the first one.

We understand that a unique viewer would be a more ideal metric, but no reporting firm that I am aware of currently has a means to accurately and fully measure a video ad network. We have been working with comScore over the past year to determine how best to reflect YuMe within VideoMetrix, but unfortunately we are not quite there yet. For example, we support multiple types of ad formats, like interactive overlays, which VideoMetrix currently doesn’t track.

So, where does this leave us? After speaking with comScore and understanding their concerns, we have provided them with additional documentation that will hopefully alleviate these concerns. We are working closely with comScore to resolve how we are reported in MediaMetrix and I am hopeful that we will come to a resolution that works for the both of us. I just want to make sure that comScore applies the same standards and measurement rules to YuMe as they do to all entities reported in MediaMetrix.

- Molly Glover Gallatin

We sponsored CIMA’s (Chicago Interactive Marketing Association) White Sox baseball game this past Monday.  Over 100 ad agency folks attended the game.  We had the private “fan deck” for the event and passed out cool YuMe t-shirts and did a drawing for an HD camcorder!  Check out some footage and pictures from the game:

- Lynn

comScore released its MediaMetrix rankings of the top online properties for the month of June and I am excited to announce that we have broken into the Top 10 of their Top 50 Ad Focus Ranking. Thanks to our stellar business development team and an influx in publishers joining YuMe’s ad network, including blip.tv, Demand Media and Microsoft, we now reach over 134 million unique visitors per month, which is 71% of the US online population. With over 500 million video streams per month, YuMe is definitively the largest video ad network.

Source: comScore MediaMetrix, June 2008

There have been a lot of stories in the press alluding to the fact that there is not enough “quality” video content out there for advertisers – not any more! Not only have we amassed significant reach, but we are focused on premium and brand safe content, so advertisers can now achieve both audience scale and peace of mind in knowing that their brand won’t be associated with inappropriate content.

- Molly Glover Gallatin

Watch TVTonic’s free internet TV service, enjoy great content when you want, online or offline!

YuMe is happy to announce our partnership with Wavexpress’ TVTonic free internet television service.  TVTonic is a great showcase of YuMe’s dynamic ad insertion technology for online and offline video viewing.  In addition, the YuMe platform offers TVTonic advertisers the ability to target content channels with the most effective ad units. 

Through Windows Media Center, subscribers can sign up for TVTonic and immediately access free, top notch content in channels like Technology, Lifestyle, Women, Gaming, Kids and Sports – including the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.  These top channels include HD shows such as Rocketboom, Golf Tips, Draftguys TV, and others covering Cooking and Parenting topics.

The YuMe integrated service is now available with the recently launched version 3.3 of TVTonic for Windows Media Center.

- Rosanne Lee Vathana

In the past few days, both TechCrunch and the WSJ have reported about how both YouTube and VideoEgg are trying new ad formats. YouTube is rumoured to have finally capitulated to pressure and run a pre-roll. VideoEgg announced a raft of new formats. Saying I told you so is fairly pompous, bombastic and sophomoric, but I’m in that mood at the moment. Readers of these pages have heard us repeatedly state that the ad formats are not the issue. You need to find the right environment which consists of three things, the content, the user and the ad; and it’s the mix of all three that will determine the success or failure of an ad campaign. And to put a finer point on it, the ad could vary from user to user and from content-to-content. Yes, carried to the extreme, it’ll cause mass confusion and may have scalability problems, but as the market fragments and user’s can choose whatever they want, we’ll all just have to deal with that problem.

A few specific comments on the VideoEgg announcement along the lines of “I told you so” is that we’ve been running their LIVE, RICH and LOCAL ads for over a year now. Wonder when they’ll start running pre-rolls?

- Jayant Kadambi

YuMe welcomes a great addition to our music channel: Baeble Music.  Baeblemusic.com is a destination for fans of live music concerts – visitors can check out online videos of the hottest bands playing at the best venues around the country.  Baeble’s community of twenty-something music enthusiasts view concert footage, review shows and compile band profiles for emerging acts such as: The New Pornographers, Blond Redhead, Ben Kweller, The Bravery, Shout Out Louds.   In addition, Baeble Music distributes the shows through Youtube, Imeem, Veoh, Vuze, Blinkx, Babelgum, as well as key music destinations on the web.

- Rosanne Lee Vathana

Recently I had a chance to connect with Mark Glaser from PBS’s excellent MediaShift blog to talk about video advertising.  Mark’s post went up today, and it’s a great overview of what’s going on in the industry today.  Great stuff on ad formats, the rise of Hulu, and on small and medium businesses making video ads, and quotes from companies like Brightcove,  Tremor Media  and AR&D.   

If Mark isn’t one of your daily reads, he should be…

 - Jayant Kadambi

Our growth in quality publisher impressions continues unabated today with our announcement of Microsoft’s unsold inventory to the YuMe stable of premium publishers. We are proud to announce not only that we can now offer advertisers MSN inventory, but we have also been selected as the video ad platform to serve and manage all of Microsoft’s unsold and excess video inventory. For little YuMe, this is great validation of our technology, our platform and our business in general. Our network now reaches over 65% of the US online audience; comprises over 120 million unique visitors and continues to offer real scale for targeted, premium ad spending in the US.

- Jayant Kadambi

So, it’s finally happened. What you ask? A content owner, and not a shabby one at that, Disney is streaming a feature length movie, in its entirety, for free, albeit with a couple of adverts. There is a single 30 second Post Cocoa Pebbles commercial, followed by a Disney commercial at the beginning of Finding Nemo, which ended last week. I believe Monsters Inc is next.

And there is this impossibly cool companion banner that kind of glides in from the lower right-hand side of the web page. Compared to sitting through what seems like an interminable 15 minutes of trailers at the beginning of some blockbuster movies, this is great.

You can’t fast-forward, rewind, or anything, but it’s still great to see content owners begin to dabble in streaming high-value content. If they had ways to monetise it on sites all over the web and they could syndicate the distribution of it, and still track everything, they’d get a lot more eyeballs, I bet.

- Jayant Kadambi