Description

In February, I spoke with Nicholas Ascheim who has recently promoted to Vice President for Editorial Products at the NYTimes.com. Nick explains the opportunities and challenges for newspapers to move beyond the pre-roll ads to other forms of revenue. (He refers to the development of sponsor-video opportunities in this interview.)

Transcript

New York Times Nicholas Ascheim on Moving Beyond Pre-rolls Interviewer: What are those with the range of opportunities for ads to be inserted into the video and where does that stand and where it might be going? Nicholas Ascheim: Well, right now the industry really is all about pre-roll. And we, too are offering pre-roll opportunities to advertisers. And we try to limit it a little bit on the side, because I think it’s sort of conventionally accepted now that, it’s not the best user experience. If you’ve clicked to watch a video, you had to stop and watch an ad that you can’t fast forward through, and you can't skip, it’s not the best way to experience our video. So right now, that’s what’s available on the site. We are looking at alternatives. We haven’t found one that makes sense yet and we’re sort of watching the industry to see where it goes. But, we’ve spoken to advertisers and we’ve spoken to users. Both sides are fairly interested in finding alternatives. One thing that we have been exploring is the idea of displaying long form of advertising which we certainly not come into form of pre-roll. You would not have to watch long for advertising before you watch one of our videos. But, advertisers have expressed a real interest in getting longer form of content out there to an engaged audience who are really interested in what they have to discuss. So, we’ve created an environment on our video page, on the video library page which is not available yet but it will be soon. We’re calling it the Video Lounge and it really is for exactly that. It's for the most interested users. So, if an advertiser has an area that they’ve really delve deeply into and a product that they think that it’s worthy of longer explanation or initiative that they’ve undertaken, maybe outside of their kind of normal realm that they think requires more explanation or if they’ve got something entertaining to present to users. This would give them an environment to do it. And really, again, it’s sort of up to them what the content is going to look like, how long it is. We’ll give them some guidance but it’s really their environment.