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Oovvuu’s founders ran video for global media companies for almost a decade. Viewing was rising, ad rates were frothy yet all our businesses made multi-million dollar losses.

We asked peers for their secrets but found they were all in loss too. How could it be? What were we doing wrong? Was something endemically broken in our industry?

In 2014, we quit our jobs to create Oovvuu to find out. Our mission was to put a relevant video in every article and create a profitable video model for media.

We have been dissecting the global video economy ever since; streams, ads, devices, viewer behaviours, engagement.

We have traced the shifting consumption of a billion consumers, the fragmentation of devices, the evolution of content from short form to long, the evolution of ad yields and the importance of trust, all against the backdrop of Facebook and Google’s dangerous duopoly.

We have attracted powerful partners. More than 100 broadcasters including the BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, AP, AFP, Business Insider and The Guardian now trust Oovvuu to distribute their programming daily.

IBM Watson and Amazon have invested in helping us develop our tech. Now Intel have joined too.

What we have learned together has uncovered some core disciplines that publishers can take advantage of to become profitable in video.

Audience:
If content is king then distribution is queen. Acquiring an audience is expensive. It costs Netflix ~$125 to acquire each new customer, but publishers already have huge audiences. Audiences who trust news brands and are engaged. That makes publishers well placed to succeed. If you have a big audience, are you really making the most of that advantage?

As a rule of thumb, two million monthly video viewers will generate $1 million in gross ad revenue annually. Think on this though. It only takes the top 26 content providers and publishers to work together to have an audience comparable with Facebook. Isn’t that worth doing?

Content:
Oovvuu has streamed 100,000-plus videos, across 60 genres, hundreds of millions of times, to news hungry audiences in 143 countries for more than five years. We know what audiences want to watch, how they are willing to engage, and which ad formats drive the best returns for publishers and agencies alike. It’s one of the reasons the content providers work with us.

Our Compass tech can literally read stories at the speed they are published and get the right video to your news team in less than a second.

Technology:
Oovvuu’s founders have been working in video since before YouTube, Facebook, and the iPad. We have devoted tens of thousands of hours to solving its challenges, to become deep subject matter experts.

From online video platforms, to content mix, to ad tech, to storage and tech, from CMS integration, reporting and analytics, we have done it all. At our core, though, we are journalists. Passionate about supporting our industry. We have lived your challenges, that’s why you can trust us as a partner.

Sales:
A billion people watch news video every day, and still want more. We have grown video inventory for publishers by as much as 30x, but hitting video KPIs is only half the battle. Google’s YouTube and Facebook now dominate the ad market, commanding as much as 85 per cent of video ad revenue in some markets.

Oovvuu works hand in glove with your ad sales teams, offering market insights, actionable insights from peers and even backfilling ads with programmatic solutions if you need. If you grow traffic, we will help you grow revenues alongside it.

Positioning:
All videos are not equal, and where you position them in the article is critical. The right video in the right position can command a 34% click to play rate. That is, if your article has been ready 10,000 times, 3,400 of those views will lead to a video view, and an ad.

Using the wrong video in a grab for volume, or putting the right video in the wrong spot, can cost you millions over the course of a year, and deny your audience access to video they want. We can help. Oovvuu has won multiple awards for its work, being described as a gossamer thread for publishers to follow through the often confusing fog of video.

We roll these learnings up into our world-leading Compass suite, giving you the video, tools and insights you need to get to video profitability.

Over years of trial and error, and sharing data and learnings with publishers all over the world, we have discovered a sustainable business model for video.

Rather than us share it with you, we asked our publishing partners across the world to share the details of the specific strategies they are employing via the Oovvuu platform to win, and win big.

It starts with four fundamental truths:

A billion people are watching video on news sites every day, and they want more.
Publishers have the audience, but until Oovvuu, lacked enough video to meet demand.
Broadcasters had the video, but until Oovvuu, lacked global, ubiquitous, instant distribution, and
Advertisers are seeking brand safe content, watched by engaged audiences, at scale, after a slew of terrible scandals at YouTube and Facebook.

Oovvuu pulls the threads together.

Our technology, called Compass, reads articles, watches video and matches them together. It recommends the right video to journalists at just the right moment, when they are publishing their story.

One video, in one article, in one click, watched by 10,000 people, per article, per publisher, across 500 publishers, unleashes a network effect. It’s that scalability that led to us being funded by IBM and Amazon, and more recently Intel, as we leverage the cloud and A.I to accelerate.

Four years on from Oovvuu’s modest beginnings, TV is becoming video and heading online, and publishers share an ambition for every news article to feature video. The video ad market is now worth US$52 billion, so the time has come to pay attention.

Here, we and our publishers share the core disciplines we have discovered together are essential for anyone aiming to be profitable in the emerging video economy.

Focus, focus and… focus.

We can provide you with the tools and tricks you need, but you will only be successful if your team focuses on winning.

So aim for a video in every article.

The mobile-centric future means news will be increasingly video-led. Now is the time to get in the game. Set your team’s expectation that EVERY article has at least one video in it.

Oovvuu has been created to provide a one-click solution to put the right video into the right article. We provide the video you need, and the tools to make it simple, meaning a video in every article is now possible for the first time.

You need LOTS of video, and all the time

With major media companies publishing 2,500 stories an hour or more, you need access to a critical mass and never-ending stream of video.

Doing rights deals with broadcasters is time-consuming, complicated and expense. Oovvuu has done all this for you. We provide all the content for free too, in return for a revenue share.

That means you can use Oovvuu as a powerful video wire.

We deliver more than 1,000 new news videos every day, covering the big stories as they happen and much much more. Our catalogue numbers hundreds of thousands of titles, long and short, across more than 60 genres.

Consider Oovvuu as a video wire service. Dive in whenever to find new story ideas, knowing you have a video ready.

It couldn’t be simpler.

We put an Oovvuu button in your content management system (CMS) and you can browse latest and trending videos, or search by keyword or genre. Any which way, you’ll find something.

Ensure great videos get top billing.

All videos are not equal. Their relevance to the article, and their position within it, impact on success.

Relevant videos need to be published in the hero position, right at the top. This typically leads to a 35% click to play rate, which means 10,000 page views will convert to 3,500 video streams. Some publish as many as 2,500 stories an hour.

Do the math. It’s huge.

Some videos are explicitly relevant. That is they are about exactly the same thing. Others are implicitly relevant, which might be an explainer, or background, or a biography, of the main person in the article. These should be published too, but perhaps four paragraphs down the story.

These implicit videos, if they come from a reputable source like the ones Oovvuu supplies, attract an 11% click to view rate.

We also provide a carousel tool, that automatically creates a list of related videos for the foot of articles. This can be a timeline, or more videos, or viewpoints on the same topic. This footer position typically has a 2% click to view rate.

You reap what you sow.

If these play rates look high to you, then you have probably be relying on substandard video. People are smart, and crappy, clickbait fare will underperform. Just get better video from us.

Deploy Strap for fast breaking news video in every article.

Modern news moves fast, so catching the breaking news as it happens results in traffic spikes.

Oovvuu Strap was created to mirror rolling news services like Sky or CNN.

It embeds at the top of all webpages, and updates automatically every 60 seconds, as news breaks, needing no editorial touch.

It works seamlessly in homepages, section pages and articles, meaning no reader need ever miss big news as it breaks.

Every video runs with a pre-roll, and it automatically plays on to the next video with an ad between each. This converts page views to video views at a rate of 11%.

Strap’s feeds can be tailored to your needs. For example, a world news feed in world news, or business, or tech, or lifestyle, or motoring, or travel and so on.

We provide feeds across more than 60 genres, and we can even blend feeds too: Lifestyle, health and fitness and travel for example.

Strap straddles the language barrier.

As Strap delivers feeds, it can use APIs to support any language.

If you publish in Hindi, or Cantonese, no matter. So long as Strap has a native language feed, it can embed in that page.

We just need the feed, the URLs and we can deploy Strap in an hour. And it still delivers ads, generating new revenue on every page.

Strap is the fix for monetising your wires.

Most sites rely on wires for sections they do not staff. This might be world news, world business, and so on.

Oovvuu has video feeds for all these, and Strap can deliver breaking news feeds into all of them dynamically.

It means you can have a video in every wire article by default without any editorial effort, and make money every time.

Don’t overlook your AMP pages.

It is common for publishers to have as many as 30% of their page views in AMP pages. Oovvuu supports AMP. Just tell us you want it, and we’ll add it at no cost.

Find and empower an Oovvuu champion.

Oovvuu provides the tech and content, but success is really down to you, your focus and your people.

Appoint a person we can work with to check every article and start growing the traffic.

We will ensure they shine, and success wins a lot of friends.

Once you are up and running, more of the team will want to join in, and that will create sustainable momentum.

It is not uncommon for publishers who do it well to grow video traffic 30x or more in the first year.

We can provide online training, weekly updates, we can even embed members of our editorial team in your office.

Set attainable targets and measure them.

It’s important to know what success looks like from the outset.

KPI your entire editorial time on a monthly video target, and select a single champion to own it.

You can safely set this as 11% of the total views of the pages where Oovvuu is being used.

Your team can ensure they meet the targets by focusing on the number of videos embedded, which positions they are embedded in and deploying Strap in as many spots as possible.

If you are falling behind, you can backfill by writing unique articles are written using Oovvuu as a video feed.

Share this KPI with the broader editorial team and ask them to contribute. Done positively, this will bring new champions to the surface who want to help.

Set very clear targets for commercial.

As Oovvuu is global, we have oversight of video ad yields in every major market in the world. We will discuss with you, and agreed projected streams, CPMs and sell through, relevant to your market.

Through that, a revenue budget will be agreed and this will set the sales team’s targets.

If you are falling behind on ad sales, Oovvuu has a backfill sales solution, called Connect, that can help close the gap, but for this to work, we need you to be delivering a minimum of 10,000 video ads a day, or 300,000-a-month.

Zero in on performance with Oovvuu dashboards.

We provide analytics to help your teams, which show video performance on a daily basis.

It displays video views versus target, what people watched, which broadcasters proved most popular and how you are tracking to your monthly goals.

We provide multiple logins for your key team members.

Five disciplines to make your video strategy profitable and sustainable

Publishers share 16 brilliant steps to win, and win big, at video