Adap.tv, a San Mateo, Calif. company that provides ads for online videos, has raised $10 million -- as a slew of competitors, including Google, try to do the same.
The company's technology provides contextually relevant advertising that runs at the bottom of a video as it plays (our early coverage here). This is sometimes called in-line ads, which are distinct from many other video-ad providers that include ads that take over the video player before, during or after the video has finished playing.
An Adap.tv example is a video featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo, below. It includes ads that feature a book about Ronaldo's life story on sale at Overstock.com. If you click on the ad, you'll be taken to the Overstock sale page.
Adap.tv is going head-to-head with a number of other video-ad providers -- including Scanscout, which raised $7 million in May, and EveryZing, a video-search company also working on similar technology, that raised $10 million in June.
Adap.tv's investors highlighted its newly-formed business partnerships as important advantages in the race to monetize online video. One is with MetaCafe, an online video-sharing site, which is currently running Adap.tv's ads (as seen in the Ronaldo example above). Another is with Comcast's ThePlatform, a video service provider for other media organizations, which has recently begun providing Adap.tv's services to its clients.
Google's YouTube is also experimenting with in-line ads, although it has yet to provide details about it publicly.
Another interesting company trying to monetize videos is BroadRamp. Its core business is in content delivery. But it is also trying to highlight valuable products such as trucks or purses that appear in a video, then alerts the viewer to which items can be purchased (such as a truck that an actor is driving). The user then clicks in the item, adding it to a shopping cart. At the end of the video, the viewer can make credit-card purchases through the shopping cart.
Gemini Israel Funds made an earlier investment in the company, and was joined in this latest round by Redpoint Ventures.