Monetize Your Video Clips: New Integrated Video Advertising Engine Gives You The Means - AdBrite InVideo

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Are you a videomaker, an independent video producer or a web publisher interested in monetizing your video based content? While here at Master New Media I have recently showcased some of the most interesting ways to monetize online video content, I have to admit that the degree of control you have over the end result (integration of ads into the video) has, so far, left ample margins of improvement.

The graphic ad display area you see in the above ad sample appears only if you hover with your mouse on the video clip, disappearing automatically when you move your mouse away.

AdBrite InVideo is a new facility offered by the homonymous online self-service advertising marketplace to their already very compelling, easy-to-use and well organized blog monetization tools.

, which breaks new ground by handing over greater control over contextual ad integration, branding, ownership and distribution options to independent web video publishers.

While providing a rather simple and straightforward set of key options, AdBrite InVideo delivers highly customizable and easily embeddable video players that carry advertising in a cool, dynamic and much less intrusive fashion alongside a small but powerful feature set that places this service apart from the pack. Here its key strengths:

• A totally customizable video player, that can be resized to any dimensions you see fit
• Auto-hiding ad display over video that unobtrusively delivers ad-content without interrupting the flow of the video, or making viewers wait to watch it
• Leveraging of the video clip surrounding frame to host a simple but highly effective text-based ad call
• The ability to add your own custom watermark to your videos, so that your logo goes everywhere your video clips go
• Sharing abilities allowing anyone to re-use, re-publish and embed your video into any other web page or blog
• The ability to continue earning ad-revenue regardless of whether your video is embedded in your own site, or somebody else's

Key to this new service then is not just the ability to connect advertisers with video makers, to their mutual benefit, but also to give independent producers the tools to brand and retain credit for their hard work, however far their videos might travel on the viral network.

In this quick-guide, I take you through the AdBrite InVideo facilities and options, showing you how much improvement and interesting ideas this new service brings to the marketplace.

Introducing AdBrite InVideo

Besides having come up with a fresh new take on how to best integrate ads into video clips, while providing other pioneering new features to their nice embeddable video players, AdBrite has also managed to create a tool that, at least compared to some of the competition is indeed remarkably simple.

With AdBrite InVideo creating and publishing an embeddable video player with integrated ads does really take minutes rather than hours, while offering a degree of customization only seen thus far in the more complex Brightcove video publishing and distribution platform.

These are probably AdBrite InVideo key strengths: ease of use, immediacy, few essential but very effective features. And that is often what makes a tool compelling for many, non-technical users.

Among others, the simplicity and immediacy with which anyone can effectively brand her online video content, by the use of a watermark, is certainly one, as more and more people are increasingly looking at how to make sure they are credited for their work.

But, the innovative ideas in this new tool do not end here.

In this brief video introduction to the AdBrite InVideo service, produced by AdBrite itself, you can quite a good idea of some of the new ideas and possibilities that are now available to you:

The process

So how do you integrate ads into your video clips to increase your revenue?

AdBrite InVideo has done a great job in making this process supereasy and within the reach of just about everyone. In this quick-guide I'll take you through the InVideo process to get your video content customized, branded, ad-ready and fit to be embedded and distributed virally on just about any web site or blog (while still making money for you).

Your raw video

Kick off the process by selecting the video clip(s) you want to use, and make sure that these are encoded in the Flash Video FLV format. This is a key requirement for any video clip you want to use with AdBrite InVideo. It must be a Flash video file: no Quicktime, no Windows Media, no Real. If you use iMovie, Kino or Windows Movie Maker, bets are that you are not even familiar with this video file format that has become highly relevant for video publishing only in the last year or so.

Luckily there are a number of tools and services that allow you to easily convert your video file into the required .flv Flash format. You can easily convert and encode your video clips into the right format using free online tools such as ZamZar or HeyWatch, or if you prefer to use downloadable software, Riva FLV Encoder or UltraVideo Flash Converter provide all of the features needed to do the job right.

The best solution from my personal viewpoint is one which allows you not only to convert your video clip to Flash video but that also takes care of hosting your file, instead of forcing you to take these as two separate and more time consuming steps. Happily there is one such host that will automatically make an FLV file for you, while hosting it for you indefinitely at no extra cost: read on to find out which service does all this good for you at zero cost.

Hosting your raw video

So whether you've now converted your video to FLV or not, you can now go about uploading it to a video hosting site. Now there aren't a great many of these sites that will give you an FLV file with its own URL. YouTube and Google Video look like contenders, but they really aren't, as the videos you end up with are wrapped in their own players.

By far the best solution for hosting your video is Blip.TV, which not only takes care of housing your video for distribution to the web but automatically creates a Flash video copy of it for you. Simple - a host and a quick way to convert your video, all rolled into one.

Once you have your video on Blip.TV, you need to grab its URL. You do this by clicking on the 'share' tab, under your video, followed by the 'Permalinks' tab. Here you can copy and paste the exact location of your video - it will be the one that ends in '.flv' if you have any doubts.

Next up, you're going to take that copied URL and paste it into AdBrite InVideo's interface.

Customize your video

Now comes the fun (and easy part) - the customization of your video content.

When you add a video to the AdBrite InVideo facility, you are faced with a familiar set of questions, such as the category that your video fits into, a description of its contents, a parental rating key for the movie, and of course the all important location of the video file you uploaded to Blip.TV.

However, in addition to these standard requests, you can give yourself and your potential advertising partners a hand by listing keywords that best describe your content, so as to better the chances of well targeted, contextual advertising finding its way into your video.

There is also the option to opt out of the advertising altogether if you are only interested in packaging your video in a slick video player that can be embedded into your web page.

Furthermore, additional overrides give you the option of turning autoplay on or off, displaying a custom preview image on your video if it is syndicated, and most usefully of all, a way to ensure that wherever your video is embedded, it will direct viewers back to the URL of your choice.

This is one of a couple of features that helps you to safeguard your content from those unscrupulous enough to republish your video content without giving you any credit for it, a practice that is unfortunately becoming increasingly popular.

Further customization options

If that was all there was to it, AdBrite InVideo would be a useful service, but nothing more than that. But beyond this solid foundation there are a great many more customization options that bring AdBrite InVideo into a different league from most of the other competitors in this marketplace.

Some of these options are to be found in the 'global player settings' that will be applied to your entire collection of videos.

Along with the ability to allow your video to be shared and embedded elsewhere (or not), you have the option of uploading a watermark or logo that will be displayed on top of your video content, as you can see in the example video below.

This watermark is simply comprised of a JPG, GIF or PNG image file, although the PNG format is preferable if you want to use transparency in your logo or watermark image. Watermarking is a very powerful and much in-demand feature for online video publishers and in many cases may even justify by itself the adoption of the InVideo service facilities, given that alternatives means of watermarking your video can be much more costly and / or time consuming. On top of this, AdBrite InVideo allows you select where to place the watermark on your video from a range of several default positions.

By branding your video, you can be sure that regardless of whoever republishes your video into another blog or website, viewers will have a way to tell from where this content is coming from and who is its author. While easy to be discounted, I see this indeed as a truly competitive strength point of AdBrite new offering along the ability to have traffic sent from your video directly to your website (something that YouTube or Google Videos for example do not do very well).

Furthermore, when your content is syndicated by others, you can select among different display options that your player will revert to before and after your video clip has been played. These can comprise of a preview image of your choosing, your watermark, or else the player's share menu if you particularly want to push the video's viral potential to the fullest.

Ready to publish - Resize the video player to your needs

Before publishing online, one last key option you have available is the one to precisely customize the size of the video player to be created.

This is a relatively recent (and very welcome) trend, seen recently in SplashCast's player. By allowing you to select the size of your video player, you are given much greater control of how you integrate it into your particular website, and this would be a welcome option in any Internet video player - the majority of which have, for some unfathomable reason, thus far avoided handing over this important feature (though you can simply hand edit embed codes from YouTube and similar video sharing services and simply change the final display size to whatever you want).

Now your video is ready to be published online.

An example

The following example video was taken through the very process described above, and showcases the effectiveness of watermarking along with the effect that the integrated ads should generate. (For now the video is not displaying any ad but we expect this to be due only to the fact that the service was launched only hours ago).

See what you think:

Conclusions

AdBrite InVideo offers a simple way for independent video producers to quickly customize and monetize their online video content, retain control of any income made from it, and ensure that they are credited for the work they've done - all in one.

In what is becoming a competitive marketplace for those looking to marry viral video and contextual advertising, AdBrite InVideo manages to get our spotlight on it as it stands out for the ease and simplicity with which it provides control over end results while providing innovative means to maintain credit, build brand image, get higher clickthrough back to your site all while monetizing views with relevant contextual ads displayed over and around the video player area.

While some will bemoan the need to host your video file elsewhere, or the limitation of only being allowed to use Flash FLV files, neither present too great a challenge. Flash video has become the standard means of high quality, fast-streaming internet video - at least for the time being - and there are a number of places where video can be stored for nothing.

In actual fact, by prizing hosting apart from customization and monetization of your content, AdBrite has done you somewhat of a favour. This is the first service I have personally seen that will send traffic directly from your video - wherever it is being viewed - back to your website, rather than keeping it for itself, just like most video sharing site do. This, in and by itself is another killer option that makes AdBrite InVideo so inviting for the small online video publisher.

Added to the powerful customization and branding possibilities that the service opens up, AdBrite InVideo looks set to become a valuable way to take greater control of your content, along with its revenue-making options.

After all, why have your video line GooTube's pockets when it can be lining your own?

Additional resources

If you would like to learn more about AdBrite InVideo, you could take a look at the following websites:

• AdBrite InVideo's homepage
• FAQ on video formats you can use with AdBrite InVideo
• FAQ on getting the best out of Flash video
• FAQ on watermarking your video
• What the blogosphere has to say about AdBrite InVideo, via Technorati blog search

Originally written by Michael Pick - Edited by Robin Good and first published on Master New Media as:
Monetize Your Video Clips: Integrated Video Advertising Engine Gives You The Means - AdBrite InVideo

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