Msnbc.com, the first major U.S. news site to provide embeddable videos, is moving to monetize its embedded videos and has a new association with YuMe, the Redwood City, California-based video ad network.
Msnbc.com will continue to manage advertising on its own site, as YuMe will manage video insertion, sales and reporting for the embedded videos.
While msnbc.com has massive traffic and scale, the company sees opportunities on non-company sites where the videos appear.
Historically, advertisers have been apprehensive about where an embeddable player might appear with an ad outside of the media brand. YuMe says that viewers of embedded videos are even more engaged. The selection and presentation of a specific clip on a Web site or blog means that video will have enhanced audience engagement.
Last week we caught up with YuMe CEO Michael Mathieu who gave us the overview on embeddable players, the msnbc.com deal and the look of YuMe video ad units.
Earlier this month, YuMe raised $2.9 million in equity funding, Venture Beat reported.
Here's the news reported by the Associated Press
Here's the press release.
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
Video Transcript
Michael Mathieu: Our value to MSNBC is really twofold. One is being able to enable advertising within all of their embeddable players, and secondly what we do is we sell all of the ads within those embeddable players. So we bring in ad revenues for MSNBC. So really we're in that technology business so we empower that widget, that imbeddible player to be monetized and secondly we actually monetize it for them. So we generate revenue.
Andy Plesser: And what kind of ads are inserted into the embeddable player?
Michael Mathieu: Well we, the way we sell as an ad network is we sell by channel. So anybody who wants the news channel, for example, and it could be anywhere from a Kelloggs or a Coke, any advertiser who really wants to reach that demographic, we typically put in a 15 second pre-roll into that embeddable player or that video content.
What YuMe is capable of doing, this is called an in-sync video, and it allows us to synchronize the left hand video with the 300 x 250 ad unit on the right hand side. So you'll see Borat peeking out from the video, so we interact with the screen in general and he can also peak out and you'll see "Bruno" just jumped into the 300 x 250. So it synchronizes both ad units.
For the publisher, really I think ultimately what's gonna happen in this, this world that we live in is more and more people are going to be viewing content outside of the main parent site. So MSNBC content can ultimately be viewed on a Facebook page or it could be viewed on an iPhone or it could be viewed on a Blackberry. So ultimately our goal is to allow MSNBC to monetize content no matter where that content's being viewed.
And here's an advertisement for AXE, and you'll notice the video on the right hand in this spray goes along the whole screen so it's, again, as the video plays the 300 x 250 fills up with sweat, so to speak, so it shows really powerful interactivity and really powerful engagement.
What we've seen is people are looking for audience; our advertisers are looking for audience, whether it be eighteen to 49 year old male, it doesn't necessarily, they don't necessarily need to be on a particular site to reach that, that audience. So really, we find, the advertisers are more interested in the content and their brands being associated with this particular content than the actual environment that they actually reach. So we bring those two worlds together. We allow MSNBC to monetize their content and actually expand from their own domain and conversely we allow advertisers in a brand-safe, reportable fashion to be able to deliver that audience to the advertiser.
