NuCaptcha, the recently launched video captcha technology, is rolling out a new offering tonight: NuCaptcha Engage. Like the startup’s previous product, the platform uses video to determine if people are really human but adds a twist in the form of brand advertising.
Captchas are security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human or a spambot. Most Captchas you see are transcription, text-based Captchas. NuCaptcha is trying to disrupt the space by adding video to the mix.
NuCaptcha Engage allows brands to place advertisements behind the actual Captcha text. NuCaptcha’s video animation technology aims to be easier to read and more secure, with animation that makes the captcha far easier for humans to solve. You can find examples of the technology here.
NuCaptcha’s formats are available in a variety of sizes and will soon be incorporated on the advertiser side by brands such as Electronic Arts, Activision, and Disney. Pricing is either on a video CPM basis ($10 to $25), or a cost-per-engagement basis ($0.10 to $1.00), for larger, longer videos.
In tests, NuCaptcha’s adds have experienced 100 percent higher user engagement than traditional online advertisements. NuCaptcha’s pitch is that Captchas are used massively across the web (over 100 billion
captchas were used last year alone) and it makes sense to eek out some revenue from this traffic in the form of advertising. On the publisher side, captchas are promised to be more engaging compared to the average text formats.
It should be interesting to see if NuCaptcha’s advertisement formats will take off. Since NuCaptcha’s launch in June, the startup is now used by over 3,500 websites. In September, five millon captchas were served using the platform, and the startup is on schedule to serve ten million in October.