Description

Boston-based online video platform Brightcove has integrated Taboola to provide publishing clients, including The New York Times, with the means to increase video views by serving up related video thumbnails around a video player or as supplement to text page. We sat down with Liz Hughes, who heads sales and marketing for Taboola and Chris Johnston, who heads Technology Partnerships at Brightcove, to discuss the opportunities for publishers to expand consumption of current and archived video.

Transcript

How Taboola Helps Brightcove Get More Hits Liz Hughes: I represent Taboola and we are the leaders in video discovery and video recommendation. And we have integrated our recommendation product into the Brightcove’s system both at the player level as well as in the CMS. And we have a number of customers who are working with us together and we’re seeing some really terrific results. Male: And it's great. So Chris, now a lot of these publishers have a great deal of video sort of it surfaced as we’ve seen, some of it is not. What has been the challenge historically and what do you guys are trying to solve here? Chris Johnston: Sure, so as publishers get customers to their site and viewing their video they’ve attracted them with either through some search or something exposed on the homepage and they're able to show that video to that customer. And ideally with all businesses you want the reviewers to be consuming more video because it’s valuable to the consumer. If they're interested in it, it’s valuable to the publisher because it results in higher use or engagement and there are few ways to do that. But the most important thing that they can do is provide them with more products that they like. So if they’ve come and watch the video and they’ve watched it to the end, or they watch some significant portion of it, what the publisher would want to be able to do is say, “Okay viewer, you watched a significant portion of this video, do I have other content in my library that is enough like it that I can then show to you and keep you on my site longer so you can consume some more of that video.” That’s ultimately the problem that Taboola help us solve. Male: Okay, tell us a little bit about the integration, about what publishers do, how it works about organization? Chris Johnston: Some of that I’ll lead to Liz because she can speak a little bit about more about her business but the integration that they’ve done is essentially a plug-in to the break of online video platform and into our player whereby the content of the library is ingested into Taboola system. They know information about the video, about the metadata. They can use some information about the consumer and their viewing habits and then max those up to the work flow from a publisher standpoint as I understand it is couple of day’s worth of work. It's really making the players able to load up the Taboola plug-in. It's allowing the Taboola system then to be able to ingest and scrape all those videos, so it knows some information about the videos and from there just works its magic, an awful term to use in this business. In the monetization thing, the monetization aspect of this is something that it is really intriguing here because typically as you add more technology solutions to a problem that you're trying to solve, each one of those solutions cost you another penny or a nickel or a dime. And it makes it tougher publishers to maintain a business that way because if you're making a dollar on advertising you have to give away 95 cents of the technology you're no longer in the business. What Taboola does is ultimately grow the advertising part. So they pay only on lift, on increased videos that are viewed as result of the Taboola, of the Taboola plug in and they’ve run an AB test they can access. They can control against it. And then out of the additional videos that are viewed, there are some advertising that’s run in only those new videos and revenue from that advertising they have been shared back with the publisher. So not only is there a no cuff to the publisher, it’s actually a new revenue stream. Male: You know for a recent publisher getting a visibility from our time is very important. How much of a challenge is that? What do publishers have been doing and what kind of move? Chris Johnston: That’s a great point, so we have at a break off a lot of customers who are actively digitizing their libraries of content. You know months, years, decade’s worth of video content which is great to have but now you have terabytes and digitized content and big deal if nobody can find it. I mean it’s not going to make any difference at it. It's not going to help you. There is this concept of ever green content which is content that doesn’t expire over time or it still has interest in evaluative viewer but only to the extent that they can see it. So using recommendation system like Taboola, being able to make sure that viewers have the ability to find and watch that kind of content, pass it onto their friends and acquaintances through sharing tools. Those are the kinds of things that can help bring value to those archives of content. Liz Hughes: The other thing that Taboola had also does is give article readers exposure to video. So even on sites that are not typically brand, video brands or that arch video brands. Most sites have way more article videos or article content they do video. So exposing those article or flat content users to video also provides a lift in education for publishers as well. Male: And how is the value of new video as business for you guys. Or publishers it seems like most this stuff is probably news centric. What is it bubbling else to this system? Chris Johnston: I would say there are a couple of trends both recommended and organic if you will. And it’s a great question. I’ll do my best to answer it, I don’t know from the authority on it. From our prospective, one thing that has infinite amount of appeal not just in video but in print and on television is celebrity content, right? So stuff about Lindsay Lohan well I think always be popular and we found that with many of our publishers as well to do that kind of content. That kind of content really lends itself well to recommendations because you know one video of Lindsay Lohan is self imploding. It can lead to a dozen others and they will all be equally consumed by people who are interested in that. So that’s one very specific genre. Another one is as you said news of the day whether it be tragedy which are called from particular is very attracted to or any other out of the ordinary kind of news whether it’s financial news or business news or weather news or any other kind of news. Those are the kinds of things that it’s surfaced in one place, get shared virally and then can lead to other related stories around that, around that kind of news. So I would say those are sort of the two things that have the most topical day-to-day viewing and leading to similar kinds of content. And then the third would be sort of the ever green kind of content that I was pointing to where if I have a story about fuel prices today and whatever summer is coming around and price of oil skyrockets and fuels out of control and there’s a story about that. When that’s going to lead to my back catalog of video stories about or how did we get to this point in oil prices or gas prices and other things that were related, that weren’t necessarily happening today but happening in the past month or quarter or even the past year, so that continues are crucial value to that web content.