• by Shankar Gupta , February 6, 2006

For the first time since its 2004 launch, the popular video Web log Rocketboom is selling ad inventory on its site. Unlike other Web publishers, the company isn't working with a media buyer or ad network. Instead, Rocketboom is auctioning off its video inventory on eBay.

The auction is for five post-roll video ads, which will run each daily Rocketboom video log entry March 6 through March 10. Rocketboom will conceive, create, and produce the winners' ads, which will run from 15 to 30 seconds. Although Rocketboom will produce the ad, the marketer will be able to give input and will have final approval over the finished product. Rocketboom reserves the right to reject any bidder, and said in its eBay posting that it won't accept pornography or gambling ads.

Andrew Michael Baron, Rocketboom's founder, said his company will create the ads in order to maintain some degree of control over what appears on the site. "Some really great brands that we would likely want to team up with would never be able to turn over their brands like this. These companies are not available to innovate in advertising, but they can fare well later once a trend is working," he said. "Outside of this auction, we hope to work with advertisers in a way that allows both parties to remain in control."

The bidding, which started at $500, had reached $14,999.99, by Sunday. The eBay ad promises one million impressions minimum. The two top bidders, "Dave-Texas" and "FivePercentCard_com," don't appear to be brand marketers. Baron said he originally anticipated that the ads would sell for somewhere between $8,000 and $40,000, based on an estimate Internet expert Jeff Jarvis gave the company.

BlogAds founder Henry Copeland, whose firm bid on the ad space but dropped out when the bidding topped $12,000, said the inventory's value might be worth as much as $50,000. "Being the first advertiser on a cult show like this, with the ads actually being produced with Amanda, assuming that is the case, is worth a lot more than $15,000," he said, referring to Rocketboom star Amanda Congdon. "An anal-retentive media buyer will get focused on the difficulty of verifying the viewership numbers, how many of the downloads are actually watched--and miss the novelty value and cult status of the show."

Copeland said it was not surprising that the bidding had not yet reached the higher valuations, and that the top bidders are not big-name brands. "A decision to spend takes way too long to make it through the bowels of the decision-making process," he said. "And a lot of buyers are going to have trouble with Rocketboom having creative control over the ads."

Baron also said that Rocketboom used eBay because conventional ad sellers moved too slowly. "We tried to go with ad sellers, but it was taking too long and our deadlines were never met," he said. "We kept hearing that it was taking too much time for the advertisers and everyone else to understand how it could work."