Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Sharethrough CEO on Why You Should Care About Social Video Ads (Video)

Sharethrough is a new kind of ad platform: One focused exclusively on video and social sharing. It doesn’t make viral videos, but it does help sites create custom ad units that fit with the flavor of their community of sites, like Reddit and BuzzFeed. The company charges on a cost-per-view basis. And yes, it guarantees it can get your funny ad a lot of views.

In advertising speak, San Francisco-based Sharethrough combines earned media and paid media. For example, it helped get this recent short film for Lego by Pereira & O’Dell, which was rather nifty on its own, 1.5 million views in two weeks on various platforms.

Sharethrough competes with companies such as Visible Measures, TubeMogul and Jun Group. And together, they’re competing with more conventional video ad units, like pre-rolls. The various firms are all trying to gain visibility in the emerging social video ad market by releasing stats and forecasts. Visible Measures said social video ad campaigns generated more than 2.7 billion views in 2010, up from 820 million in 2009. And here’s a recent demographic breakdown of Jun Group data.

Sharethrough, for its part, said it is now signing $75,000 campaigns on average, up from $20,000 a year ago. It has also doubled its number of customers to 100 in the last year.

If you count YouTube, according to Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg, the social video ad market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone else probably counts for about $50 million combined, he said.

Here’s a video of Greenberg explaining Sharethrough and what it does. His company has raised a total of $6 million from investors including North Bridge Venture Partners and Floodgate.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google