According to Frost and Sullivan, the mobile video market will grow from 28.8 million in 2004 to $1.5B five years later (2009). In addition, mobile providers are intending to capture that market through service offerings (video, ringtones, games). Doesn’t sound like a lot of room for ad revenue.
Penn Media has announced that they intend to place a “proprietary video player” called Vidsense on its network of Web sites to serve video ads and content. “Most sites can’t afford to license content, encode, stream, and sell advertising for their site. Most sites do not have the reach. The Vidsense program takes care of all of this.” ( Jaffer Ali, CEO PennMedia.com).
So let’s get this straight. They’ve got a hold of some old video content, put ads in them, transcoded them (probably in flash – that’s the easiest although not the best looking), and they’ll put them on your site. You use a little video player (lots of Java players out there) to record the views. They make money from the advertiser on the views and pass a few pennies your way. If the player has a problem, though, it’s probably your problem.
Also, there are the bandwidth issues – to wit, who pays? A reasonably sized video (like a 2 minute flash) is about 4 MBytes, and most hosts will notice if you’re streaming more than two at a time, and charge you accordingly. So those few pennies you make may not offset the bandwidth costs you incur.
I’m all for video – that’s what we do at ExecProducer. We work with publishers and bloggers to create, deploy, and monetize their own current and timely content. Since we’re on the content creation side, we want you to make money on the best quality video we produce and deploy. Google ads may be a better bargain right now if you can’t afford to create and control your own content and revenue stream.