Auditude's Fingerprinting Powers Contextual Ad Service on MySpace
By Bill Rosenblatt
November 6, 2008
Auditude, a video fingerprinting startup,
announced on Monday that
it has struck a deal with MySpace and MTV Networks to enable contextual
advertising for clips of MTV content uploaded by users to the social networking
site. Auditude's technology includes ad inventory tracking as well as the
ability to overlay information about the videos onto the clips themselves.
MTV and MySpace will share in the resulting ad revenue.
This deal resembles a similar arrangement for music that the music-oriented
social networking site
imeem already has in place with Warner Music Group and other music
companies, using the Gracenote audio fingerprinting technology. The main
difference here is that Auditude has built out a complete ad campaign management
and inventory platform for online video, whereas other fingerprinting companies
have not.
This is an important milestone in the evolution of the fingerprinting market.
To use terminology of the tech marketing guru Geoffrey Moore, audio/video
contextual advertising is the second "bowling pin" (niche market application)
for fingerprinting. The first bowling pin, using fingerprinting to
identify and block unauthorized uploads and downloads, relies on the same
underlying technology but is qualitatively different from a business standpoint.
This technology could bring about a profound shift in the way content is
marketed online; it may even pave the way for the video industry to follow music
into a model that depends more on advertising revenue and less on direct sales
to consumers. The implications of this shift on content quality have yet
to be determined. When we sketched this model out in a
white paper
back in April, we envisioned marketing executives from content companies
pitching new artists, TV shows, etc., to ad executives looking to buy media that
reaches certain demographics; Auditude is the first company to build out and
launch this vision in its entirety.
Reaction to Auditude's launch with MySpace and MTV in the blogosphere has
been largely positive, unlike reactions to uses of content identification
technologies used to block uploads and downloads because of suspected copyright
infringement. Nevertheless, let's make no mistake about it: this is a use
of a rights management technology to enable a new online content business model.
It's a welcome change to see such a thing get positive publicity, for once.