The next startup we’re profiling is London-based invideous.com, a video technology company that aggregates third party video content for consumers while simultaneously providing a monetisation platform for publishers.

If you run a B2C startup and fancy a ‘Start Me Up!’ profile then email editor@econsultancy.com.

What is invideous?
Invideous is a plugin which online publishers can add to their existing video player package in order to charge for content. The plugin also delivers in-video direct marketing ads linking to vendors of items featured in the video.

What problem does invideous solve?
Invideous enables publishers to quickly and easily charge for their content, either on a pay-per-minute, pay-per-view or subscription basis. Users create one account with invideous which can be used to pay for content on any participating third party sites. Users can top up by credit card, premium phone call and SMS meaning it’s quick and easy to add funds and spend them on video content or in-video items. Everything takes place ‘in-player’ meaning that a publisher doesn’t have to change their page layout, and viewers don’t have to leave the video they were watching.

When and why did you launch it?
We launch officially on Tuesday 1 June following several months of BETA testing. The time is right for publishers to use more innovative models to earn from their video content, and for advertisers to exploit the promise of video in a performance driven manner.

Who is your target audience?
We have a twin focus on video publishers who want to charge for content (launch version supports JW Player and Brightcove OVPs) and video consumers who want to view premium video content across a raft of publishers.

What are your ultimate goals?
Our ultimate goals are pretty ambitious. Firstly, we want to be the wallet of choice for cross-site, cross-player online video consumption. No-one else that we’re aware of is doing this at the moment, so provided we keep on top of our product development and continue to hone the user experience, we’ve got a good run at emerging as a leader.

Secondly, and as a longer term proposition, we hope to be the default control panel for a user’s in-video experience. Many aspects of the internet can be customised, and the user is empowered to define their experience; the invideous controls extend this user choice to the in-video experience. For publishers who enable the feature, users can already control whether they see any video ads, paying a small fee if they don’t want to.

Next step on this journey – a feature currently in live testing – is one which allows a viewer to set their default e-commerce provider for certain in-video items. For example, if you always buy electricals from Amazon, you can set to see Amazon as a default ad / link provider rather than play.com. This should do wonders for conversion rates.

Ultimately, we want to become an integral part to a viewer’s video experience by making it better and more personalised.

What were the biggest challenges involved in building invideous?
Not having much money! We self-funded (for a year and a half) until two months ago which was tough, not only because of the stresses of bootstrapping, but because we had to undertake projects to satisfy short-term cash requirements which deflected us a little from the bigger picture.

Having said this, having to watch the pennies has been a great discipline and also means that we’ve been very commercially focused. I think this is reflected in the product; we’re interested in how it can make us and our clients money. It’s as mercenary as that.

How will the company make money?
We make money on a revenue share basis with publishers on both the payments and in-video ad product lines. We will also be using both products from a publisher’s perspective, essentially ‘eating our own dog food’. Not only do we expect this to be lucrative, but it means we’re properly using the platform from a client’s perspective which has already done wonders for continuing product development.

What is your pricing model?
Ads are generally sold on a PPC basis in a similar manner to Google paid search campaigns. It’s up to publishers how much they charge for their content. This can be on a subscription, pay-per-view or pay-per-minute basis. 

We are confident that publishers will also enjoy experimenting with our ‘no video ads’ option. This lets publishers set a small fee that viewers can pay NOT to see ads. Not only does this give viewers their choice of user experience, it lets publishers ramp up their video ad load considerably to those who want to watch for free still!

Who is in the team and what does it look like?
The team is led by co-founders Jack Thorogood and Colin Phillips, both of whom have been working in the online interactive video space for a number of years.  There are 5 other team members in total, mainly on the technical side. We are based in central London.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years time?
In one year’s time we’d like to have built a good amount of buzz around the product offering and have a number of publishers benefiting from the service on an international basis; perhaps 500k to 1m consumer users with active invideous.com accounts.

In three year’s time we hope to have removed the need for viewers to click away from a video player to buy almost any item, but particularly items in the consumer goods space.  These should be available within the player window, and the purchase price should be being deducted from a user’s invideous wallet.

In five years time, we plan to be on a beach somewhere.

Posts from the Econsultancy blog

With all the negative attention that Facebook has received for its privacy approach recently, the media — and regulators — are especially sensitive about online privacy right now.

But there’s another kind of site that is raising privacy flags. People search. These sites compile personal data without consumers’ knowledge. It’s just the kind of thing that is sure to draw regulators. But lumping these sites in with online marketing efforts is a mistake.

The data collected on sites like ZabaSearch, BeenVerified, and Spokeo makes people very uncomfortable. It’s not just personal data. It is personally identifiable (and often free). You can find people’s names, addresses and income — regardless of whether they’ve ever signed on to these sites. But people search sites aren’t stealing this info. They’re gathering it from publicly available sources.

They crawl the web, gathering data from social networks, business sites, phone directories, marketing surveys and publicly available records like mailing lists and census reports.

Once that all gets collected in one place it starts to feel like a violation. Until recently, for instance, Spokeo paired people’s addresses with images of their homes found on Google street view.

The internet makes things like that easy. But consumers are not pleased. There’s now a Facebook group called NO
MORE SPOKEO, and a growing number of groups trying to get such services stopped.  Local television crews are on the beat, and more than a few local government agencies are initiating investigations.
 
Spokeo’s tagline is “not your grandma’s phonebook,” and the site prides itself on the breadth of information it has collected on people. It isn’t always accurate, but as people share more info online and more government agencies work toward transparency of public records, that is sure to change.

Spokeo doesn’t think it is doing anything wrong. A spokesperson told me:

“As far as privacy concerns, I’ve observed a lot of myths that have been going around about Spokeo that may affect what people think about the site. Spokeo does not display credit score/information, social security numbers, or drivers licenses. We only display publicly accessible information. There are privacy concerns among the mainstream public, which is why we offer our free opt out privacy page where people can remove their listings from.”

They do have a point. According to Lisa Sotto, a partner at Hunton & Williams LLP:

“We need to get comfortable with the fact that we live in the information age. Data is going to be ubiquitous and available.”

Sotto says that the internet hasn’t eliminated privacy, it has just made it easier to organize and find information.

“Privacy in the past was really a function of the data being dispersed in file cabinets in hard copy. Now you can find a huge amount of data from one chair.”

But that doesn’t mean that regulation won’t happen.  Sotto says the main problem is that “it’s extremely difficult to legislate in this arena other than to impose very broad rules.”

And if people search sites get regulated with broad rules many other areas online would be affected. Already, online marketers are having trouble collecting and retaining information they use to target consumers.

Regulation in this area could make that worse, even though most of the information collected on people search sites is useless to digital marketers.

According to Mike Zaneis, vice president of public policy at the Internet Advertising Bureau:

“The dangerous part is when these types of practices become conflated with mainstream marketing practices.”

If Congress were to get something like people search in its cross hairs, it could have serious repercussions for the online ad industry. While seeing information like name, address and household income can be frightening for individuals, it’s not the kind of information that marketers find useful.

In the offline world, marketers have long been targeting consumers based on their address and personalizing mailings. But online, purchasing and browsing history is more valuable than your name and birthdate.

However, the automatic opt-in nature of both services could get them lumped together in the eyes of regulators. Says Zaneis:

“The challenge is to educate about the actual business model online, and not have offline fears drive the debate in the online world.”

Image: Spokeo

Posts from the Econsultancy blog

As many as 163,000 jobs could be lost in the next four years if VAT is increased, warns the British Retail Consortium.
 
In its first year, a VAT rate of 20 per cent would reduce the deficit by £11.3 billion but by the end of that first year there would be 30,000 fewer jobs in the UK, across all employment sectors – than if there had been no increase, it claims.
 
Stephen Robertson, director general of the BRC, says: ‘The budget deficit is serious. It has to be tackled but proposals must be judged against the implications for jobs and growth revealed by this new information.’

The BRC has urged the government to prioritise public spending cuts over tax rises to tackle the budget deficit, as well as to aim to half the deficit over four years rather than the proposed three.
 
 

Latest News | small business news and advice

Cost cutting is in the air, as the new government wipes the blood from its axe following the first round of public sector spending cuts. But for SMEs also looking to save money, a less painful way to reduce overheads could be staring them in the face.

Throughout the last year most small businesses have had to make tough decisions about staff costs, whether in the form of pay freezes, cutting salaries, moving to short-time working or letting people go. But when it comes to speaking to suppliers about better prices, it seems many are shying away from crucial savings.

Some 31 per cent of owner-managers say they do not see themselves as strong negotiators, while 13 per cent believe bargaining with suppliers doesn’t make a difference, found a recent survey.

These are worrying figures, as they suggest that a large proportion are missing out on securing better deals, something you can be sure their larger competitors are not failing to do. In the current climate (and particularly if the economy takes another turn for the worse) meekness is not a virtue.

But you don’t have to hold a gun to your suppliers’ heads and make them an offer they can’t refuse. Most of the time all it takes is an honest conversation.

Richard Perry, chief operations officer at media company GyroHSR renegotiated deals on contracts by cutting his number of suppliers by half and offering the existing ones more business in exchange for better terms.

He says: ‘From my own experience when clients ask for rate reductions, it’s a lot easier if there’s a dialogue. It’s all about respect and reaching a common understanding, rather than taking an antagonistic approach. I feel we now have much stronger relationships with them as a result.’

Lisa Smith, executive at water cooler company Tana Water, managed to secure a 40 per cent reduction in product costs by entering into a long-term partnership with one of her suppliers. ‘Just dealing with one supplier means they are guaranteed to increase sales over the long-term and so are able to offer the most competitive pricing,’ she says.

It may sound cheesy, but having strong business relationships is more important than ever.

SmallBusiness.co.uk Blogs

You can indeed make money through affiliate marketing without a website. Methods that do not require a website are email marketing, paid search, and even offline marketing (print, radio, TV, etc). However, there’s something every paid search marketer must know prior to launching a PPC affiliate marketing campaign without a website.

On February 26, 2010 Entrepreneur.com published an article entitled “How to Make Money Online Without a Website”. In it, author Allen Moon stated that with proper keyword research and good PPC advertising skills anyone can make money off affiliate programs through paid search marketing. True. But very seldom “without a website.” The problem is not with Google deciding to “only display one ad per search
query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display
URL” (more
here), but with the very idea of PPC affiliate marketing without a website. The article reads:

“Direct linking means that you can join affiliate programs, create ads for their products, and send click-throughs directly to the merchant’s site. There’s no need to build an intermediary site or use your own site to direct traffic. When your click-throughs convert, you get a commission.”

Sounds easy, and attractive, but the fact of the matter is that multiple advertisers prohibit DTM (direct-to-merchant) affiliate linking altogether.

I just analyzed paid search affiliate policies from the top 10 merchants on the Internet Retailer’s Top 500 List. Here’s what I read:

1) Amazon.com Inc.

“After careful review of how we are investing our
advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer
pay advertising fees to Associates who send users to
www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword
bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search
engines.” [source]

2) Staples Inc.

“Affiliates must use their own landing page
prior to linking to Staples.com” [from Staples' "Special Instructions for
Search Marketing Publishers" on Commission Junction]

3) Dell Inc.

Again on CJ: “Search Campaigns – Direct Linking”
section:
Are publishers allowed to link directly to my Web site from search
marketing campaigns? –No

4) Apple Inc.

same as above

5) Office Depot Inc

“Office depot does not” allow DTM linking [reply I've just received from LinkShare]

6) Walmart.com

awaiting clarification from LinkShare, will post an update later

7) OfficeMax Inc

awaiting clarification from Google Affiliate Network

Sears Holdings Corp.

awaiting clarification from Google Affiliate Network

9) CDW Corp.

No
affiliate program

10) Best Buy Co

“Search Campaigns – Direct Linking” section of
their CJ program rules:
Are publishers allowed to link directly to my Web site from search
marketing campaigns? –No

Apparently, direct-to-merchant linking, or the very idea behind PPC affiliate marketing “without a webiste” will not work with most of the above-quoted merchants, and the situation will be the same with hundreds of other affiliate programs too. As written elsewhere, DTM linking from affiliate PPC campaigns has been historically associated with lower quality traffic, often coupled with trademark poaching, or even copying merchant’s own ads. Add Google’s policy to allow only one unique display URL per ad copy, and it is obviously why merchants frequently decide to disallow it in their affiliate programs’ TOS.

As stated at the very outset, I’m not saying that there is no such thing as affiliate marketing without a website; only that most merchants will have a problem with direct linking. Do check with the merchant prior to investing your time and money into DTM PPC campaigns.

Posts from the Econsultancy blog