Videoplaza, a Swedish startup that helps publishers optimize the way they serve video ads, raised $5 million to expand across Europe. Creandum and Northzone, two leading Scandinavian venture capital firms, led the round for the company which started breaking even in November.
The company has spent more than two years building sophisticated technology that helps online sites figure out which videos ads to use when, so that they elicit the highest click-through rates.
Stockholm-based Videoplaza is not an ad network like VideoEgg, but rather a set of tools that can determine when to show a consumer a pre-roll ad, post-roll or a branded overlay that sits on top of a player.
Chief executive Sorosh Tavakoli says that's a tough feat because different ad networks have different rules. Some only allow you skin video players, or display an ad that wraps around the video. Others only let you show pre-roll ads, or short ads before a video starts. Tavakoli says Videoplaza takes all these rules into consideration when automatically choosing between ad formats.
Tavakoli says Videoplaza can help raise ad revenues by making sure that a customer doesn't see repeat ads or gets to view them at consistent times. For example, even if a visitor clicks through 20 or 30 videos in a single session, Videoplaza can ensure that they only see one ad every five minutes. The company also delivers analytics, so customers can see the percentage of users that interacted for every time an ad was displayed, and how much time visitors actually spent engaged with a campaign.