Online advertising

RyteMeow – Video Serving Sharing App + Lesson On Advertising

Ed: I wonder if the horse has bolted on the video space, the three big Western players Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are all pushing video hard, and then all the micro players are very popular with their demographics, add to this the massive growth of real time streaming with Periscope and Meerkat and you wonder if the users might not be a little fatigued.

Im not sure there is a place for another video server and I don’t buy the value proposition that sharing video is overly broken and whilst it might be subject to some spam or incorrect labelling, its not clear to me that this is a huge issue for users.

It’s probably not enough of an issue for creators and consumers to move from Youtube and Facebook where all the content is across to a platform that has no content.

Pretty sure users prefer content which might be mislabelled in some cases to no content.

The comments about the pre-roll videos advertising are a little naive, the service has to be paid for somehow and unless they are building a completely different approach to monitisation which the world hasn’t used yet they will need to run video ads.

Online advertisers are used to spending their budget on buy banners and prerolls, sometimes sponsored stories or adwords.

Unless you feel you can build a completely new video service and a completely new advertising system, (adserving, reporting, payments, customer interface and a new ad format) and then get sufficient customers to use your new format/system then your startup will need to use an existing monetisation model.

Most startups struggle on executing on one of these objectives, very few can execute on all three.

 

Startup Name RyteMeow
What problem are you solving? We’re buildingRyteMeow to fill a huge need in the social sharing video space. To this point, the video sharing experience has been limited by 3 pain points:A glut of irrelevant or poorly constructed content tagged or titled as relevant, when it’s not (e.g. a YouTube video labeled “Austin Guitar Player” but has nothing to do with the title, the uploader merely wanted it to list in this category).
Inefficiency/Ineffectiveness of “local” designation. Viewers can’t always be sure the video being viewed is in the locale they choose, because of incorrect tagging of content is intentionally edited to contain a great deal of uploader’s ideas/thoughts/product sandwiched around a smaller amount of the searched-for content.
The pain of pre-roll adverts. You want 5 Seconds of rock, but you get 45 seconds of GEICO.
RyteMeow solves all of that in a dynamic, interactive platform that enables hyper-targeted, shared videos that are always relevant to what you want. And by maintaining a laser focus on user experience and quality of content, we eliminate the pitfalls that have befallen other “microshare” apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc…

Users CANNOT simply upload a video and tag it to a geodefined area (like Austin) and have it show up for that area. Our algorithm ensures that won’t happen.
By maintaining a firm grip on the relevance of a user’s experience, we’ll avoid that dreaded “spam fatigue” that all other apps have experienced. Simply put, as a user, you’re creating your own highlight reel of your favorite experiences, and sharing with others.

What is your solution? Gives people a way to share and view videos the way they want, with hyper-local, hyper-relevant content, so they always find what they want and can connect with those who share that interest.
RyteMeow is like a search engine on overdrive for the best, most relevant videos, with social sharing built in.
Target Market blogger, writers, journalist, consumers
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Founders Names Todd McDougall
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Website http://rytemeow.com/
Twitter Handle @rytemeow
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Videopath – Annotate Video with Websites, Comments, Media and Code + Free Lesson on Timing

Ed: This is a great idea, about 10 years ago we built something similar called EMP with a company called Enikos that I inherited after the VCs and the founders parted ways…. (I did two of these and was known as the Cleaner for a while).

Enikos was a video spinout from one of the Universities which helped create the MPEG21 standard for digital media containers, essentially allowing you to package video and supporting elements into a single XML container that could draw them all together on a timeline.

It wasn’t as pretty but it was a long way ahead of its time. EMP allowed you mash-up video from any source into a timeline with all sorts of other media, sound, ads, Javascript code, maps and it sort of worked.

There is a thousand stories and lessons in that startup most of which I can’t share, however the one that is most salient is that often success and failure is a matter of timing.

Back then we had to build all sorts of tools to make this work, streaming and mixing video is very server and resource intensive.

It’s still not a trivial problem, managing video ingestion and serving at scale is a massive challenge but many of the platforms and tools available today make that process a lot easier.

10 years ago Amazon was only just releasing their first cloud services and many of the tools and platforms that we can spin up on Amazon or Google in a few minutes were not available.

Also the iPhone had only just been released and there was no 3rd party apps and it struggled to do video at all.

Broadband was only just being widely adopted so this added challenges as well.

Interestingly in a less enlightened time the first user of the platform was a raunchy Swedish Gay TV site. They worked out how to use our platform to serve ads along with their video and even live TV. It was quite advanced for early 2000s.

As they say the street always finds its own use for your product.

Sadly the VCs behind the company did not share our enthusiasm for the potential that serving advertising for soft core gay porn held.

Quite ironic when you think about it when you look at the leaders in web technology the guys at the front line have always been the entrepreneurs trying to sell Pills, Porn and Poker (PPP).

Serving and Scaling Video, Affiliate Marketing, e-commerce, SEO, the PPP entrepreneurs always beat mainstream online businesses.

Anyway, none of that matters now, its long hit the dead pool but bad timing either to soon or too late is a bitch.

However here is our concept reincarnated as Videopath a new slick player and platform that is completely platform compatible and timeline based.

Not sure about their pricing, but to be honest we never worked out how to price our service, stepped, per play, per $ revenue earned there are so many ways to slice it, so I don’t envy them trying to get the pricing that will work for their target market.

Based on the experience we had I would be very focused on getting people using it and wouldn’t even worry about pricing until they had 10s of thousands of users.

Get mass adoption for the basic system and perhaps introduce pricing based on number of videos hosted or even offer to serve advertising for users and split the advertising revenue with them or allow them to add their own advertising or e-commerce on the premium service.

I think the model that’s reasonable is if the user uses your system to make money they pay, otherwise users get it free and you get to serve the ads and share the revenue.

It’s not hard for a decent video to get 2000 views so essentially Videopaths pricing model is forcing everyone onto a plan, which will mean a lot of people won’t ever bother to adopt it.

Good luck guys, it’s a great concept and I hope it works, I suspect the timing is much better this time around.

Startup Name Videopath
What problem are you solving? Video is a growing medium, but it is also a very crowded space. Viewers have increasingly low attention spans and as a result content marketers and brands need new way to engage and convert viewers.Videopath offers a curiosity driven viewer experience, which has shown to deliver better engagement and conversion. First metrics from the Videopath format are showing consistently high viewer engagement and better conversion numbers over all other major video players.
What is your solution? Videopath is a video application that lets users connect web content directly to specific moments in a video.The result is an easy to use, customisable HTML5 video player that plays on all browsers and all mobile devices. With Videopath, curious viewers can find out more about a topic, without ever leaving the video player.
Target Market marketers, content creators
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Anna Rose, CEO & co-founder: Anna has over 8 years of experience in video media technology, specifically in the roles of business development, marketing, and product management.Previous to founding Videopath, she worked at Gracenote, Berlinale film festival, and Gameforge. She holds a degree in Business Management and Music Technology from McGill University

David Scharf, CTO & co-founder: David is a graduate of Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, where he studied a mixture of graphic design and computer science.

During this time he wrote, directed and edited the award winning animated short films called “The Big Brother State” and “The Forest”. After graduating, he worked for 5 years as a freelance mobile developer creating innovative video and augmented reality apps for international clients such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Fershau.Founders NamesAnna Rose, David ScharfWhat type of funding has the company received?BootstrapWebsitehttps://videopath.com/Twitter Handle@videopath

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Adhipster – Collaborative Social Media Advertising Exchange

Ed: I spent about 30 minutes using this yesterday, it’s basically an exchange where advertisers can earn credits by sharing other advertisers ads and then have their own ads shared based by other advertisers.

The app is pretty slick, not sure how much traffic or exposure I have received as the reporting is still very lightweight but I do like the fact you can choose the ads you want to share, as I would not want ads shared that I had not vetted.

adhipster-promo

It seemed to have reasonable depth of users and inventory, what wasn’t clear was if the algo took into account how many people you were sharing with to boost your credits.

adhipster-card

It also creates really nice Twitter cards, which not all businesses are able to access yet.

Could be a good short term growth hack for startups before it gets crowded.

 

Startup Name

Adhipster

What problem are you solving? Exposing your brand or product to more people on social media.
What is your solution? AdHipster is a free social media cross-promotion tool. People share your ad for free, you share theirs in return.
Why is this a great opportunity? Reach more people on social media.
Target Market Marketers, growthhackers, social media experts, SEO experts
How will you make money? Subscriptions, Advertisement
Founders Names Team of social media marketing and web development professionals
Website https://adhipster.com/
What type of funding has the company received Bootstrapped/self funded