• by Shankar Gupta , December 29, 2005

For the most part in the online world, you can have video or pay-per-performance -- pre-roll ads placed against streaming video. The pre-roll is generally sold by the impression, rather than by the click.

Penn Media, however, has introduced a scheme to sell advertisers pre-roll commercials on one of its streaming video portals, evtv1, which encompasses 16 different content streams, including travel, news, humor, politics, and sci-fi channels. The product, dubbed v-Clicks, accompanies the pre-roll commercial with a clickable banner. If the banner is clicked, the advertiser is charged for the commercial stream.

According to Penn Media CEO Jaffer Ali, the company hopes to optimize its ad prices per content clip by selling on a cost-per-thousand basis. "Because evtv1 has such a broad array of content, we have a more diverse audience than most video sites," Ali says. "People viewing Liberace and Mario Lanza are a completely different demographic than those viewing David Chappelle. So the idea was for us to optimize for click-through rate, and if we do our job correctly, our effective CPM is actually higher than selling on a straight CPM."

The v-Clicks option isn't taking the place of traditional based-based sales on the pre-roll video ad, Ali says, adding that he hopes offering CPC for video ads will draw advertisers to evtv1, which recently completed beta testing.