

Ask HN: Suggestions for ads on videos - procyon

Hi,<p>I am looking for contextual ads to be placed on our videos. We have our own flash video player and recorder on a site. We are looking at adding text/ video ads to it.
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JacobAldridge
I checked out videomailz.com briefly - from what I can gather, you allow users
to record their own video message via a webcam and send that (with a storage
facility being planned). Now you want to include ads.

I can see two issues - not annoying the user with the type of ad you include,
and determining context.

My guess is users don't want a pre-roll ad if they're sending a message
(especially if it's a short message). Post roll ads need to be exciting very
fast or they'll get ignored.

So your best bet may be a rolling text ad beneath the video message (but
formatted so it looks like the CNN ticker, part of the screen without blocking
the image, if that makes sense). Other, more subtle advertising means (like
product placement) won't work because you don't have control of the recording.

2) Getting the context will be more difficult - unless you have the technology
to analyze the video for keywords, you will need the user to give you
information, which they may be reluctant to do.

I would suggest making some kind of tag mandatory when they send, and being
honest about why you want that information - this is a free service, your
vision is to improve the effectiveness of communication, and contextual
advertising is the most profitable and least intrusive way to do so. The users
who like your service won't mind.

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procyon
Well.. we are adding a comment feature to the videos which will allow users to
enter short text messages. Also, we were going to allow users to customize
their videos by adding characters or action related animation which gives us
another anchor to extract video context. However, we are not able to find
right service to use that information and display a related ad.

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iamelgringo
IMO, broadcast TV for soccer games has had the right idea for advertising that
can be co-opted for online video.

Soccer game broadcasts usually play two 45 minute halves with very few breaks
for commercials. So, they do a lot of banner advertising along the bottom of
the screen. Sometimes it's a text crawl, sometimes it's animation. I've
noticed that Google has been experimenting with this on YouTube recently.

As to context sensitive advertising... that's a tough one. Probably your best
bet would be tagging. But, if you know that most of your audio is going to be
spoken word into a microphone, that makes your job a bit simpler. You could
try running a speech recognition program on your audio stream, and then pick
up repeated words from that to use as contextual ads.

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theoutlander
Yes, we are exploring speech recognition programs for contextual ads. I've
heard that there is another advertising service that does this on the fly.

Good point on the broadcast TV for soccer games! Thanks for the suggestions.

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ars
Just don't put the ad on top of the video. I hate that. It makes the video
skip, and is irritating.

JacobAldridge's suggestion of putting something seamlessly under the ad sounds
like the best plan to me.

~~~
theoutlander
Yes, that is what we are planning to do.

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jm3
check out VideoEgg.com

~~~
theoutlander
Guess we need to wait till we hit 1000 active daily users before we can use
VideoEgg.

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agentbleu
look into adsense for video

~~~
theoutlander
Unfortunately, Adsense for video is only available to sites with 1 million
video views per month.

