• by Adam Singolda , July 26, 2011

Yet another time, I hear the same story.

A brand publisher is surprised to find that, while members of its sales team work for a company everybody knows, advertisers do not want to work with them. So advertisers are not interested in video inventory that's brand safe, in premium content, gets quality U.S. traffic, and comes in standard ad units like pre-roll?

The reason? The inventory is too small.

Imagine you are really thirsty, and you see a huge bottle of Coca-Cola. You are obviously very interested; you pick it up, you are excited about the upcoming sip, but you surprisingly realize that the huge bottle has only few drops of coke. You would then potentially look for a brand-less bottle, but full, cold, and tasteful.

Now, back to the Internet. The concept of brand recognition and video ad buy is becoming agnostic. Advertisers realize that while, in the display world, it has historically been highly likely for a brand-name publisher to have huge amounts of PageViews for banners, that's not at all true for video. Many big brands have less than a million video views a month.

From what I hear, advertisers are looking for 10 million video views and above. The gap between what direct advertisers would pay on pre-roll to what a network can get you can be up to 5x.

Believe me, if lucrative high video revenue is of interest, you want to get to 10 million video views on the low end, per month -- brand or no brand.

How can you fix this? 1. Leverage your massive PageViews to promote videos across your site (homepage, article pages, section front, search pages, etc.)
2. Distribute your content to third-party sites in a relevant way
3. Syndicate your content to platforms like YouTube and AOL

Good luck!