YuMe, Blinkx latest video ad companies to make splash
With all the video content online, the video advertising market is booming. Investors are still placing bets on new companies, and existing companies are getting more aggressive with ad techniques. — The latest company to raise money …
Context & Ripple Effects
The video ad land grab that opened in mid-2007 is accelerating. In June, Blinkx went live with technology that listens to speech inside video clips to target ads — beating Google, Yahoo! and MySpace to market — and days later Digitalsmiths raised $6M for its own video ad approach. By July, TechCrunch was cataloguing how every startup had a different solution, a sign the category had no dominant method yet.
YuMe's new round and Blinkx's push into more aggressive ad techniques extend that pattern: investors are still writing checks into a booming market where the incumbents have not yet locked up video targeting, leaving room for specialists to claim the layer between content owners and advertisers.
First-order effects
- YuMe's fresh capital lets it scale its video ad network while rivals like Digitalsmiths are similarly funded, turning 2007 into an arms race for inventory and advertiser relationships.
- Blinkx's more aggressive ad techniques put direct pressure on Google, Yahoo! and MySpace, which it already beat to launching speech-based video targeting in June 2007.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers now face a fragmented menu of competing targeting methods — speech recognition, contextual matching, and whatever each funded startup pitches — forcing them to run tests across vendors before standards emerge.
- The steady flow of venture money into lookalike video ad plays raises the odds of consolidation, since multiple well-funded companies are chasing the same brand budgets with no clear differentiation.
Third-order effects
- If the funding wave continues, video ad technology hardens into a distinct intermediary layer between content owners and the portals, with whoever proves measurable targeting first absorbing the rest.
- The portals' late entry into speech-based and contextual video targeting suggests the structural opening for specialists exists only until the largest platforms productize the same capability in-house.
The trend: Online video advertising in 2007 is drawing a wave of venture-backed specialists betting they can out-innovate Google, Yahoo! and MySpace on targeting before the portals catch up.