RockYou thinks it can cash in on video ads in social networking apps
Widget-maker RockYou is trying to get into the online video advertising business. It is now offering video ad placements within widgets and applications on social networks, where advertisers can buy banner ads that users can "roll over" to reveal a video ad, like the one below for the Prius. Users can then share these ads with friends, causing the ad to also appear in the sender and recipients’ profiles and news feeds. This is the latest effort by the company to make money on social networks.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based company brought in well over $10 million in ad revenue last year, chief executive Lance Tokuda says (he won’t tell me exactly how much more) through a variety of other ad formats.
RockYou is distributing the videos ads across what it says are 130 million unique users who use applications on Facebook, MySpace, hi5, Bebo and Friendster. Some of these users are on RockYou’s own applications (including 12 million users on media-sharing app Super Wall), while other users are on independent partner apps that are part of RockYou’s ad network. All told these users generate more than 20 billion pageviews a month; RockYou says its new video ads will be able to get up to ten million video views a day, as a result of its reach.
:
