Bookmark Vlog Blog
Sep
19
The Future of Online Video is Here: Scanning, Reading, Monetizing
Filed Under Money & Marketing, Technology
ScanScout — an interesting, new video ad service — is claiming to do for video what Google and others have done for text: search the content and then deliver relevant ads based on what they’ve found.
And it seems they are attracting both attention and money from some big players — the latest of which is Time Warner.
How It Works
As you can see in the image above, ScanScout identifies the material in the video and then serves up ads that might be of interest to viewers based on what’s being played on screen.
Another scenario of how this might play out could be the following:
- A vlogger posts a video about a Caribbean cruise. At the beginning of the vlog, ScanScout recognizes that the video is about a cruise ship. They then deliver an overlay ad for a cruise line.
- Later in the vlog, as the ship arrives in the Bahamas, an ad from the Bahamas tourism agency pops up.
- When the vlogger shoots footage of his hotel, an ad for a hotel on the islands suddenly appears.
No doubt lots of people are working on such a solution, including Google and the other major search engines. As was mentioned in an earlier post about indexing video, the ability for search engines (or anyone else) to “crack open ” a video so that its contents can be read and index by machines is extremely valuable.
Although we aren’t completely there yet, and there’s no word on how accurate ScanScout’s system is, this is definitely a peek into the future of online video.
Now, how long will it be before Google or Yahoo or MSN gobbles these guys up?
LINKS: