TubeMogul Plays Cupid Between Advertisers and Creators

TubeMogul is giving online-video reators a profile page to showcase their work (see my Nalts profile). TubeMogul is now helping connect advertisers with popular and talented creators for ad sponsorships or custom-content development that would give brands broader access, street credibility, and a higher-impact exposure. 

I see this as far more profitable for video creators than praying on display ads in a time where the market is still gaining comfort with advertising on amateur content. There are a host of companies pursuing this “holy grail” of online video, and eventually room for a variety of models that focus on different solutions and content. I could even see this becoming a vertical play (healthcare or DIY).

Familiar with TubeMogul? Two years ago (July 31, 2006) I wrote a blog post called “Want to Get Rich? Develop a Tool That Allows Video Submitters to Upload on Multiple Sites at Once.” After a few fee-based models emerged (and after futile attempts to get a friend from TastyApps to do it), TubeMogul solved this problem. It was the outgrowth of an MBA business-plan competition, and the founders have taken it beyond what I imagined (such as analytics I didn’t know they could collect from public data).

I’m an uncompensated mouthpeace for TubeMogul because a) the tool saves me hours of mundane work a week, b) I really like the business model because of the place this secures it in the video-sharing ecosystem, c) the founders and employees are cool. Although Google could, in theory, develop a TubeMogul-crushing competitor, I think it’s unlikely. And marketers will enjoy having a detatched third-party monitoring the videos rather than a video-sharing site. An analogy is IMS, a firm that aggregates prescription data from pharmacies, and sells the data at a high premium to pharmaceutical marketers.

I spoke recently with one of YouTube’s most popular video creators, who was lamenting annoying calls from mobile-video content distributors who want to excite creators about some exclusive deal that’s going to “get you seen and make you rich.” These have become cliches: they usually fizzle and most of the companies evaporate. I told my fellow YouTuber that my answer to new destination sites or distributors is always the same… plug into TubeMogul and you can have my Nalts content for free. I’ll never get around to posting on another site in hopes that an audience develops.

I like distributing my content as widely as possible even if maybe 95% of my views are YouTube. And what’s the downside? It takes no more time to submit to YouTube and beyond via TubeMogul (versus to YouTube directly). And my non-profit videos on Yahoo will not soon cannibalize my monetized YouTube videos. If Yahoo began to share advertising revenue, I’d make a concerted effort to promote Yahoo content and create content unique to that audience. In the meantime, I see it as free marketing for me and a potential road for a sponsor to find me.

P.S. Sorry this was boring. But here’s an old video I did where I show my real age.