October 21, 2019

Nate Kelly

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, 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.


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