Exclusive - Online video ad technology company Tremor Video has purchased InPlay, the video analytics solution for publishers, from TubeMogul. Tremor Video will integrate InPlay directly into VideoHub, its enterprise video platform. → Read More
For the past four years, TubeMogul has built itself up as one of the premier tools for online video producers to syndicate and analyze their online videos across the Web. Last year, it launched a video ad network called PlayTime that took advantage of all the video viewership data it was collecting, and on the strength of that product it raised $10 million last October. The company has been busy putting that money to work building on top of PlayTime to create a soup-to-nuts video ad platform around which it is relaunching the entire company today.
TubeMogul is now completely focussed on brand advertisers and their digital ad agencies. CEO Brett Wilson says it is “one place they can buy, place, track and optimize their video ads.” He calls it a demand-side platform (DSP) for video ads, much like Google-owned Invite Media is a DSP for ad agencies. It’s not just an ad network, it’s a whole lot more, folding in analytics and the ability to selectively place video ads on specific sites, or even to tie into existing advertising relationships. → Read More
In the third quarter of 2010, BrightCove and Tube Mogul’s Online Video & The Media Industry report showed that Facebook passed Yahoo to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites). Facebook has continued its reign as the second largest referrer of traffic, behind Google, in the fourth quarter of 2010 according to a new report from the video platform companies.
Facebook exhibited the healthiest growth rates in terms of referral traffic, now accounting for 11.8% of all referred video traffic to media companies. The report says that the social network’s growth is mainly attributed to Facebook’s increasing support for white-listed embedded video that plays in-stream, allowing for contextual viewing without requiring any redirect of traffic. Google accounts for 60% of traffic whereas Twitter only accounts for around 2% of traffic. Clearly, search drives views. → Read More
When it comes to getting people to watch online videos from media sites, Google is still the largest source of outside traffic. Search drives views. But the second largest source of traffic is not Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine. It is now Facebook. According to a report on Online Video & The Media Industry put out jointly by Tubemogul and Brightcove, Facebook passed Yahoo in the third quarter to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites).
In the third quarter, Facebook shares accounted for 9.6 percent of online video traffic. Google still towers above Facebook with more than 50 percent of the referring traffic coming from search, but that is down from the second quarter when it was above 60 percent. In fact, across all search (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), referral traffic to videos on media sites is down. → Read More
Video advertising and analytics startup TubeMogul closed a $10 million Series B financing. The round was led by Foundation Capital, with existing investors Trinity Ventures and Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners (where WallStrip and StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon is a partner) also putting in more money. Previously, the company raised $5.4 million. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is a board member and one of its angel investors.
TubeMogul is best known as an online video analytics service, but it makes its money as a data-driven video ad platform. CEO Brett Wilson projects revenues this year will hit $10 million, up from $2.6 million in 2009. “We just did a $1.1 million month in September,” he says. → Read More
If you regularly put up video on the Web, you are going to love this. TubeMogul is making InPlay, its video player analytics, free now. InPlay is like Google Analytics for video. It charts all the views, embeds, completion rates, traffic sources, search terms, and stream quality of the videos you put up on your site or embed in players across the Web. InPlay works with a variety of video players, including Flash (Adobe’s OSMF), Brightcove, FlowPlayer, JWPlayer, and Kaltura. You can sign up here.
Just like with Google Analytics for Websites, InPlay lets video publishers see how their videos are doing at a glance. You can see fever charts of views over time, a list of top videos, geographic viewership on a map, rebuffering rates (which is a measure of the quality of the streaming experience), and even pie chart of which search terms are driving views. For example, above is a breakdown of where the most embedded views for our newly launched TechCrunch TV came from over the past month. TechCrunch accounts for 71 percent of embedded views, followed by Techrunch.tv (11.6 percent), Gizmodo (7.4 percent), 9to5mac (5.4 percet) and lifehacker (4.6 percent). → Read More
Facebook is now the fifth largest video site by audience size. ComScore estimates that 41 million people a month watch videos on Facebook, which is more than on Hulu, CBS,, or Microsoft’s sites. What is remarkable about Facebook’s rise as a video destination is that it isn’t even trying very hard to be a video site. “I don’t think Facebook has video strategy per se,” says TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson.
TubeMogul tracks video analytics across the Web, and it just released some interesting data on how videos and video ads perform on Facebook compared to other sites. Roughly 40 percent of Facebook video ads, give or take, are watched all the way through across different video ad types. On the Web in general, video ad completion rates hover around 25 percent.
There are all sorts of video ads on Facebook—banner ads on the side of your feed that take over the page wen you click on them, video ads on app pages, interstitial ads which show a video when you are navigating in between pages. But the best performing video ads on Facebook are in game apps and linked to virtual currency (players watch the ad to rack up points). → Read More
You can hardly run into a media site these days that no longer includes online video (even we are getting ready to launch TechCrunch TV). But which kinds of media sites are getting the most views? In a joint report put out today by Brightcove and Tubemogul (embedded below), the non-YouTube sites seeing the most success with online video are those of the broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels. Newspaper sites are lagging when it comes to both total video views and growth.
In terms of how people are finding these videos, a little more than half (51.75 percent) are navigating directly from the publisher’s main site. Following that, Google search is the next biggest source of video-viewing traffic (38.92 percent), followed by Yahoo (5.58 percent), Bing (2.29 percent) and Facebook barely registers (with only 0.40 percent). Twitter is even smaller, but people who find videos are more engaged than any of these other sources of traffic, on average watching videos longer across different media categories. → Read More
Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner.
Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins.
With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals. → Read More
When Brightcove released a major upgrade to its online video platform last month, one of the new set of features was better analytics. It turns out that Brightcove’s new video analytics suite is powered TubeMogul. Professional video publishers who use Brightcove can now measure things like the geographic distribution of their viewers, how many seconds they watch each video, their drop-off rate, number of unique viewers, number of new viewers, as well as total video plays.
The two companies have also signed a joint R&D pact to develop new video analytics products exclusively for Brightcove. TubeMogul will also become a marketing partner for Brightcove’s paid video hosting, streaming, and advertising services. About 125,000 people use TubeMogul’s free video analytics. Many of them are online video professionals Brightcove is hoping to turn into paying subscribers for its new “low-end” $99/month plan. → Read More
