Posts Tagged ‘VideoEgg’

Maybe the folks at parent company mediabistro.com were on to something when they launched the transition of its blogs from Movable Type to WordPress: Online advertising company VideoEgg announced that it will acquire Movable Type and TypePad parent Six Apart, and the combined company will change its name to Say Media, The New York Times‘ Bits reported.

Say Media told Bits it will continue to operate and support Six Apart’s blogging tools, with Six Apart executive vice president Andrew Anker saying the company had been shifting its focus to advertising for the past two years.

Six Apart co-founder and president Mena Trott will give up her title but join Say Media’s board, and her husband, co-founder Ben Trott, will be chief technology officer, Bits reported, adding that Six Apart CEO Chris Alden will leave the company. Current VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez will assume the CEO role at Say Media.

Sanchez told GigaOM in a phone interview:

We’ve got north of 70 million techies, and that’s bigger than CNET, Wired, and IDG put together. With about 25 million moms, we’re bigger than Nickelodeon Family, BabyCenter, and the CafeMom Network combined.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Last month I hung VideoEgg out to dry after hearing a number of developers complain about VideoEgg’s inability to fill inventory and their rapidly decreasing CPMs. To put all the blame on VideoEgg isn’t completely fair though. There is an industry-wide problems which is that CPMs seem to continue going down, not the other way around. This is the exact reason I announced Social Ad Summit. Perhaps, if we get a bunch of brands, media buyers, social network execs and ad networks in a room, something positive will come out of it.

Either way, back to VideoEgg. Yesterday, VideoEgg announced a few new advertisements which as Catherine P. Taylor puts it, helps VideoEgg have another model beyond “engagement.” There are five new types of advertising solutions:

• One solution enables advertisers to include live updates to advertisements via RSS feeds.
• The second is “local mapping, which advertisers can use to provide store locations to users based on their zipcode.”
• Third is a multi-clip capability. This is pretty straight-forward. It means that each advertisement can have multiple videos in each ad placement.
• There is a mini-store “which allows marketers to display DVDs or other items for sale below the video player, and
• Finally, a share and syndicate feature which enables users interacting with an advertisement to immediately share the video within that ad on Facebook and other social networks or email it to a friend.

Last time I came out with guns blazing against VideoEgg. It may not have been totally fair considering that at least they are consistently developing new advertising solutions, some of which are completely innovative. The problem of low CPMs or not being able to fill inventory with quality advertisements is not limited to VideoEgg. Everybody in the industry is facing this problem.

While there are companies that are attacking the problem from all angles, nobody has yet to come up with the perfect solution. It’s time to put our heads together and come up with one!

“I don’t use VideoEgg anymore.” Just hours into the Graphing Social Patterns East conference, I have heard multiple developers tell me how they no longer use VideoEgg to fill their inventory. The problem? Same as it was 12 months ago. VideoEgg doesn’t have enough inventory to fill the massive demand for it. It also happens to be the same problem I wrote about this morning: the demand is practically limitless.

Initially VideoEgg was known for their great CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) but even that has begun to dwindle toward the $1.00 mark. To add fuel to the fire, VideoEgg has around 100 employees which helps them burn through their $27 million in funding. As it should be, most of their employee base works on the sales team. So where is their sales team located? Not in New York, London or L.A. where the advertisers are. They are working out of their office in San Francisco.

The company surely doesn’t need an extremely large sales team to go pitch the San Francisco Giants. I shouldn’t be completely down on the company though. They have an amazing ad system and some of the dynamic ads that they display have incredible quality. Take a look at the VideoEgg website to see examples.

VideoEgg has a short amount of time to get their team under control though. The company has hired a team of people which aren’t able to produce as far as I can tell. Every developer I’ve spoken with has dropped the company due to their inability to fill inventory. In a world where the ad companies must satisfy developers, VideoEgg is failing and despite their substantial funding they have already damaged their reputation. Do you think the company can be saved?