Another day, and another online video start-up. This one with a name that only the founder can love: Dave.TV. Unlike a series of me-too You Tube clones, this one is at least attempting to do something different. Dave.TV CEO and founder Rex Wong says his plan is to come up with AdSense for online video. Well, I have heard that story before, but Wong had sold his previous company, Applied Semantics to Google for $102 million, and claims that it was the foundation of what we today call as AdSense. So his big idea is something like this….
imagine if a computer could identify when somebody said “shampoo” or “burger” across millions of videos, and you could insert a text ad for Prell or Wendy’s along with a clickable logo graphic next to the video when those words are spoken……We will be using the same technology used by Homeland Security to monitor [telephone] chatter. Audio keywording will allow us to contextually figure out where to sell ads and to place more than just pre- and post-roll ads.
Don’t blame me for being skeptical. Or as Techdirt writes, “Imagine trying to serve ads for an episode of Lost based on what the characters are talking about. You’d get a bunch of ads for deserted islands.”
I agree with you. I think that the primary value of this technology is in indexing large video content libraries since tagging is human-driven (laborious and non-standard), subject to fraud, and doesn’t work well for lengthy content.
Furthermore, my guess is that for 80% of the video content, ad buyers and ad networks will optimize against demographic and geo data and not video context.
Looks similar to podzinger and a few other companies.
Adsense worked (works đŸ™‚ ) because it’s non-intrusive. and people are usually looking for some information when they are offered advertisements (relevant to what they search)
Do video watchers seek the same experience?
There’s always there god danm advertisers trying to get into evey single part of our lives. Next time when your pissing in the toilet the sound the water makes would trigger and ad capaign for “air refreshners”.
“..insert a text ad for Prell…” What kind of crack is this guy smoking because we don’t get that kind of good stuff in my neighborhood.
Actually not a Youtube clone – I saw him at CES in Jan 2005!
DaveTV has actually been around for months
http://www.dave.tv/press.html
Silly. That’s all I can say. Silly.