BrightRoll serving contextual ads in video
BrightRoll, a San Francisco company that places relevant advertising in vidoes, has launched with an expected $1 million in funding (we’d reported this when the company was still called PostRoller).
Announcement is here, with full list of investors, which includes True Ventures, and several Silicon Valley angels.
A number of big players are serving pre-roll advertising in videos, for example Ad.com, Broadband Enterprises and Tremor. But few of them are using technology that lets publishers specify the video’s subject matter in their ad tag requests. This helps BrightRoll automatically match the video content with relevant advertisers.
Click on the image above for an example of the post-roll and pre-roll ad (which is an interesting Metacafe video in itself, of a pelican eating a pigeon). Metacafe is one of more than 35 customers the company has signed up, says BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti. These also include Streetfire.net and BlipTV. BrightRoll assesses the kind of site, and the type of video being shown on it, when matching ads.
The company has three employees.
BrightRoll takes 50 percent of the ad revenue, but charges less depending on volume. He’ll never compete with a Valueclick, or sell ads to CNN. However, Sacerdoti said he wants to sign up networks of sites, so that he can run a relevant advertisement across, say 25 entertainment sites. The trick is getting a large enough network to make this pay.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
