Ask HN: Suggestions for ads on videos
Hi,
I am looking for contextual ads to be placed on our videos. We have our own flash video player and recorder on a site. We are looking at adding text/ video ads to it.
I am looking for contextual ads to be placed on our videos. We have our own flash video player and recorder on a site. We are looking at adding text/ video ads to it.
I can see two issues - not annoying the user with the type of ad you include, and determining context.
My guess is users don't want a pre-roll ad if they're sending a message (especially if it's a short message). Post roll ads need to be exciting very fast or they'll get ignored.
So your best bet may be a rolling text ad beneath the video message (but formatted so it looks like the CNN ticker, part of the screen without blocking the image, if that makes sense). Other, more subtle advertising means (like product placement) won't work because you don't have control of the recording.
2) Getting the context will be more difficult - unless you have the technology to analyze the video for keywords, you will need the user to give you information, which they may be reluctant to do.
I would suggest making some kind of tag mandatory when they send, and being honest about why you want that information - this is a free service, your vision is to improve the effectiveness of communication, and contextual advertising is the most profitable and least intrusive way to do so. The users who like your service won't mind.
Soccer game broadcasts usually play two 45 minute halves with very few breaks for commercials. So, they do a lot of banner advertising along the bottom of the screen. Sometimes it's a text crawl, sometimes it's animation. I've noticed that Google has been experimenting with this on YouTube recently.
As to context sensitive advertising... that's a tough one. Probably your best bet would be tagging. But, if you know that most of your audio is going to be spoken word into a microphone, that makes your job a bit simpler. You could try running a speech recognition program on your audio stream, and then pick up repeated words from that to use as contextual ads.
Good point on the broadcast TV for soccer games! Thanks for the suggestions.
JacobAldridge's suggestion of putting something seamlessly under the ad sounds like the best plan to me.