Internet Tech Boston

Last Wednesday evening I attended “The Ins and Outs of Making Money from Online Video,” a part of the video event series sponsored by PermissionTV that is produced by MITX.org. The event was sparsely populated, which was a big letdown after attending an 800+ packed house at WebInno19 just a couple of days earlier. Here’s a brief overview of the panel, and what I learned:

• Waikit Lau is co-founder of ScanScout, “the market-leading in-stream video advertising network.” Waikit showed a demonstration of the product, which included an example of an overlay video, an overlay banner, and an overlay custom flash animation (swf).
  

  Waikit Lau of ScanScout

  Waikit basically let the product do the talking, which was nice. We saw how you can utilize their product to produce fairly complex, but easy to implement ad units on top of your video content. It was clear to see how to make money from online video using ScanScout.

• Mark Pascarella is President and CEO at GoTuit Media Corp, which “enables publishers to transform entire video libraries into a superior Gotuit-enabled experience marked by best-in-class navigation, video search, targeted advertising, virtual remixing and personalized viewing.” Mark also showed a demo of the product, which showed how to apply metadata to video to give user fine grain control over types of content to watch, but it was conspicuously devoid of any advertisements. However, it wasn’t that hard to see how a combination of a 3rd party ad server and pinpoint video content accuracy could result in a high number of impressions. Mark summed it up using this example: if you’re selling ads against Major League Soccer content, your audience is probably most interested in all David Beckham goals. You can leave the rest behind.
• The last and longest speaker of the night was Chris Johnston, Senior Vice President, Director of Integrated Production at Mullen. Chris spent an awful long time showing us the GM Used Car Ambush, a brand awareness site that Mullen produced. It’s a great site, but I was confused as to why it was part of this panel. First, all of the “video content” was produced by Mullen in support of this website. Second, there were no advertisements in the site. Instead, it was souped-up brand awareness / viral site, that hopes to get its target audience to change its perception of the target brand. Whereas ScanScout and GoTuit provided solutions that enabled you to actually make money on your existing video, I was hard pressed to see the relevancy of hiring a high-priced ad agency to get comedic talent, buy a van, shoot hidden camera spots, get the “victims” to sign waivers, post-produce and edit the video, design a concept site, build the Flash components, sit back, and hope it results in someone actually buying a car.