Why raise money?

Raising money is not necessarily a good thing, even if reading too much TechCrunch might make you believe so. If your clients can’t fund you someone else has to. That’s basically what it means. Done in the right way though can be a good thing for the company, its clients and partners.

Having been going for nearly 2,5 years now, we’re seeing a massive demand for what we do. We have an approach we believe in and that we know helps publishers make more money. We have clients in 8 markets now (we signed the first Russian client yesterday) getting more and more incoming leads as our product is used by more happy clients. And to be honest, we can’t help them all today in the way we would like to. There’s still so much to be done!

In parallel to this huge client demand, we look ahead at the market and see how it all comes together. Video consumption is really changing in its roots. The old TV is being replaced by the new TV, quicker than we expected.

The new TV needs a new advertising platform and Videoplaza is building that platform.

Having set that vision in place, it’s a no brainer that investing more money than only our profits will not only be a good thing, but also strictly necessary. This is why we’ve raised 3,5M EUR (details here).

What it means

So securing this round of finance will only be good for the ones we care about – our clients and partners.

• We are expanding our development team so they can keep on making wonders to our product. This means more and smarter features.
• We will have more resources to integrate with syndication partners as well as into new emerging platforms and devices. So also here more and smarter integrations.
• We are staffing up our new Client Relations team. This will improve our service level to all of our existing and new clients. We have tons of good ideas to implement here.
• We’re staffing up our commercial team as well, helping us to help more publishers in markets we haven’t been present in before.

So, let’s get to work now! We have a bold vision and in delivering that we will be focused on one thing only – to help publishers monetise their videos in the best possible way.

Our new office by night

Personally, I’m really looking forward to the panel discussion with Aftonbladet, Expressen, TV4 and Kanal 5. I am expecting some badgering on the pro’s and con’s with long-form content versus short-form which can really be interesting. The latter two, being broadcasters, obviously advocates long-form content and it’s tv-like experience while the first two don’t lack arguments for why short-form content is better.

Myself, I’m gonna have 20 minutes on stage to explain what online video advertising is today, how the media is best used and what cool stuff is coming up in the near future. I’m hoping to have enough time to also show some inspiring examples of cool campaigns and talk about the upcoming Swedish IAB guide to in-stream advertising that we’re launching at the event.

Unfortunately the event is already over-booked, but I really encourage you all to try to get in anyway. I think it will be worth the effort!

Read more here.

Here’s the line up:
Steve Allison, Technical Evangelist, Adobe Systems EMEA
Greg Beitchman, Global Editor, Reuters News Agency
Emily Bell, Director of Digital Content, Guardian News & Media
Caroline Casey, Director, Digital Development, Turner Broadcasting
Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor, The Economist
Mary Hockaday, Head of BBC Newsroom
Stephen Pinches, Lead Product Development Manager, FT.com
Dewi Price, Head of Technology, Global Web Properties, BBC Worldwide Digital Media
Sorosh Tavakoli, Founder and CEO, Videoplaza
Jeff Whatcott, Senior Vice President, Brightcove

La Vanguardia was showcasing some of the latest things together with us, Brightcove and Adobe, and it really is cool. The quality of the images might not live up to the things demoed, but what you see is actually interactive in-stream ads (by Videoplaza), served into a Flash based videoplayer (by Brightcove), running on a normal smartphone (by Google) in the latest version of Flash Player (10.1, by Adobe) that soon is supposed to support most of the smartphones out there.

Now, Adobe’s move with Flash Player on smartphones have generated a lot of buzz and obviously is interesting to follow as the charismatic leader of a leading provider (Apple) recently outed his feelings about Flash at least semi-public.

Whether to do mobile in-stream ads with native apps, Flash or HTML5 is going to be an interesting question for the year to come. We’re already doing two (apps and Flash), have good plans for HTML5 and reality probably is that most of us in this world have to do all three in order to support all devices out there.

But it sure was cool to try this with Flash 10.1 as it required no modifications at all of our regular Flash component to get it up and running. Further, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the entire advertising eco system is kind of leaning towards Flash (big understatement) which makes it hard to push other platforms when you’re selling ads, whether you like it or not.

Ps: Ángel is apologizing for the image quality, claiming that he’s the second worst photographer in the world, but we know that he’s inaccurate as at least two of our team members (#1, #2) have an even worse track record. :)

We are happy to announce that Göteborgs-Posten just launched their Videoplaza powered web TV platform. We now serve ads for all the leading morning papers in the three largest cities in Sweden; Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo!

With GP up and running, they are together with Dagens Nyheter and Sydsvenskan offering a larger national online video package, Citypaketet. The three have a history of offering this kind of solutions to their clients for their current online ad products reaching 1.8M Unique visitors every week. Being able to offer this kind of reach will be even more critical for online video.

“We went from contract signing to launch in four weeks, including Christmas and new years! I’m excited to be launching this project with Videoplaza and adding a new powerful offer to our advertisers”, says Mikael Nordström, Business Develop Manager at Göteborgs-Posten.

One of the reasons Citypaketet hasn’t been offering video before is the fact that the three companies all use different players. Moving over to us they can continue to use different players but still achieve consistent ad formats, measurement and forecasting, all enabled through our plugin architecture.

“I’m glad that we finally can add video to our offering as it completes the print and online offerings very well adding richer experience with sound and moving images. We’re excited to adapt the the proven success formula from the other Citypaketet offerings to the online video market.” says Dan Morén, CEO at Citypaketet.

Another interesting aspect of this is the opportunity video gives Citypaketet to get a piece of the TV pie, something I know they are quite keen on.

For questions on citypaketet contact Dan Morén, CEO at Citypaketet. dan.moren[at]citypaketet.se.

So what can VAST do for me?

The core benefit of VAST is facilitating 3rd party ad serving, enabling the following:

• Enable your clients, agencies and advertisers, to 3rd party serve ads through Adform, Eyeblaster etc.
• Seamless 3rd party ad serving when syndicating to aggregators such as Dailymotion, Metacafe, Youtube (not quite yet) etc.
• Super easy ad network integrations
• And hopefully, if the standard gets adopted the way we hope: Ad serving into any platform or technology whether using Flash, Silverlight, iPhone, IPTV set-top boxes etc.

adMonsters just posted an excellent introduction to what VAST is, what it can do for operations and the challenges ahead. You don’t even have to be a programmer to understand it.

If you have any questions, ideas or general thoughts on VAST please contact us at Videoplaza. This will shake up the online video industry and we want everybody to join the revolution.

I would also argue that one of the key success factors for the aggregators will be to make sure that the syndicators will be empowered to sell and serve their own ads, preferably through their own ad server.

2010 will be a very interesting year indeed!

Looking back at 2009

Last month Videoplaza turned 2 years old and considering most things happened this year, 2009 just must have been a great year. Looking at some key metrics – that I can share – this is the progress:

• From a simple and basic product to a stable, scalable and value creating product loved by our clients
• From a team of 6 in Stockholm to 15 employees in Stockholm, London and Paris
• From 5 clients in 1 market to 20 in 6 markets
• From losing money to breaking even in November!

Not only has it been a good year for us, it’s been a great year for online video in general. We see that across all the European markets. Many of the experimental projects are turning into real volume businesses, ad networks are getting up to speed, online video is getting its own media budgets etc.

Like most people blogging, I haven’t been as active as I’d wanted to be. Part of it is that I’m more busy now, part of it is the complexity of sharing information as the company grows. Transparency is one Videoplaza’s key values so I really hope we can get better at this next year. We believe it’s important to stay open and human. We believe that is the only way to create true trust and credibility.

What to expect from 2010

Having almost reached profitability last month, we are making huge investments on all areas in 2010 taking the company to the next phase. Below are some bullets on what to expect from us:

• Dramatic increase of the team from 15 to 30-35
• Moving into a new 425m2 office in March that we signed yesterday, (we have some spare space, interested?)
• Increase of our client list with major tier 1 publishers across Europe
• The launch of a partner programme to structure all of our valuable relationships in the video eco system
• Major improvements on all levels with the product – we’re doubling the dev team!
• Exciting stuff on the world of syndication and third party ad serving
• More and better integrations with video ad networks
• Experimental projects with new platforms such as the iPhone, IPTV, media centers etc.
• More research to better understand and prove the value of instream advertising – first part of that will be published in Q1
• Happier and more profitable clients

With this blog post I’m now ready to close the lid of my Macbook and start my holiday.

Best wishes from me and the Videoplaza team from a white Stockholm!

The photo is from my kitchen window if you wonder :)

Enjoy!

With a product that is maturing, with explosive growth of online video consumption (and ad revenues) and a really positive outlook for the year to come: We feel that we need to shift gears and take Videoplaza to the next level.

We have a leading position on in-stream video ad serving in Europe. In just two years, we’ve grown to be 15 people in three countries. We have about 20 clients in five markets and the overall inventory is growing exponentially.

But with the pace things are happening now, we simply have to ramp up. 2010 is the year when Videoplaza will conquer Europe and to keep up with bold words like that, we need to expand – big time.

Let me just cut the bs and tell you this:

• We are recruiting 10 new Videoplaza rock-stars before the end of Q1 2010.
• 6 of these positions are developer roles described here. The others are for sales and admin, please drop us a line if you’re interested.
• Already now, our office is completely cramped. So we’re moving our headquarters to a new Stockholm location (TBA) – more than three times the size of our current.

With this push we’re confident that we will keep (and extend) our lead on in-stream video ad serving. We are the domain experts and intend to remain the best at what we do.

To achieve that, we can work with nothing less than the best people available. Finding 10 of those in one push is obviously going to be a challenge, so please help us out and spread the word.

Thanks!

As I’m writing this, I have just started my second week and I must say I’m thrilled to be part of the Videoplaza crew. It sure is exhausting to keep up with the pace now in the beginning, but I dare say impossible to find nicer people or a more intriguing field of business.

To sum my first week up I would have to say challenging, engaging and loads of fun. Next week it’s off to London to meet Gavin, our UK rep, and attend the Admonster dinner with him and Sorosh on the 3rd.

You’re going to hear more from me on the blog around up-coming events, trade shows, seminars etc so make sure to keep a lookout.

If you missed to tune in or want to share with friends and colleagues, here’s the presentation.

The webinar is an open invite so if your are interested in attending sign up at: http://www.brighttalk.com/channels/7143/view