Welcome to Storybids' Official Launch

Monday, May 5, 2008

We are excited and pleased to welcome you to our newly revamped and fully functional website. This product placement marketplace is the culmination of a lot of hard work from a lot of folks and two years of research and trial and error to bring you our solution to monetizing online video. Much commentary has gone into the pre-roll vs. video overlay vs. contextual vs. banner ad controversy. Quite frankly, bandwidth, especially for video, is expensive and in order to offset costs, hosting sites are looking at all sorts of solutions. The video content creators are seeking ways to defray their production costs. Advertisers are seeking new ways to get their branded messaging out. With the advent of TiVo, the 30 second commercial has lost its luster and more and more people are flocking to the web to catch up on their video consumption as traditional television viewership goes down. The writer’s strike certainly helped drive more audience to the web and the millennial generation? Forget it, these guys only want to play video games or go on the Internet and are the most rapidly declining TV audience to date.

For advertisers, trying to reach certain demographics is excruciatingly trying and unless they can shift focus as rapidly as their audience via social networks, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and every future new method of digital communication, they’re lost. Search marketing is getting increasingly harder with having to blend a social media strategy into virtually every campaign and universal search has caused the normal search engine positions to be flooded with video content driving organic terms all over the page. Seeing the writing on the wall (well before the YouTube acquisition and before universal search) as enterprise level advanced search marketers we knew which way the pendulum was swinging and it was swinging toward video. To our fellow search brethren, if you are not focused on delivering a well executed video strategy for your clients now then you most certainly will in the future. So being as clairvoyant as we were, we attempted to learn as much as we could about the upcoming video onslaught and we applied everything we learned during the last decade in the fast paced times of Internet advertising and took into account conversions, analytics, algorithms and brand messaging and came away with the solution you see before you today.

Our target market is the ever growing populace of video content creators with particular focus on video bloggers, serial mini drama productions and episodic webisodes. We feel that the transition from traditional television is rapidly approaching and we wanted to be prepared with a full scale solution so our initial concentration is on online video - both user generated and professionally scripted. Our solution allows video content creators to upload a variety of media in an effort to display their ideas and they may upload a storyboard from a particular series they are producing, upload a trailer from an indie film production, a sample video from a previous successful viral video, images, photos - quite frankly anything that gets the point across to an advertiser. The advertiser may browse by a number of search criterion including age, genre or rating of the content producer. It may be a case of strictly viewership numbers or shows already produced that meet their brand focus.

What this brings us to is traditional supply and demand issues, with major motion picture and even with episodic television; you get only one chance at potentially great brand integration. Who can forget ET and the Reese’s Pieces? Tom Cruise and Ray Ban in Risky Business? With Internet programming there is currently oversupply and limited advertising opportunities, but we see that day diminishing as content focus becomes less user generated and more professionally scripted. As video content creators begin to realize that they may benefit via an alliance with a major brand and as they begin to realize monetary compensation for their efforts, they begin to get better, soon there is only one LonelyGirl 15 placement. Brand integration done now at lower price points will begin to yield tremendous results as the Internet populous continues to grow, broadband initiatives multiply, mobile computing takes on rapid growth and new generations of Internet users take to the bandwaves of video content. Take for example one of the highest viewed viral videos of all time – “The Evolution of Dance” by Judson Laipply.

This 6 minute recourse into the past 50 years of dance moves has been seen almost 85 Million times as I write this. 85 Million! In the video he is wearing an Orange Crush T-Shirt. What would Nike or Reebok or Pepsi have paid for the chance at a Superbowl ad type of audience impression? This year’s Superbowl was viewed by 97.5 million people and the average 30 second spot went for $2.7 Million DOLLARS – what does that translate to for a 6 minute brand integration that will continue to live on into the future and increase in views while this year’s Superbowl ads go into the archives?

For these reasons we bring you Storybids. Go ahead and register, its amazingly simple and you may register as either a content creator (Media Seller) or advertiser (Ad Buyer). Welcome aboard.

Joseph Morin and Juan Prado – Co-Founders