LiveRails is a BETA release which is taking a new slant on the idea of video advertising. Instead of Pre-roll or Post-roll Ads, LiveRails is offering an Opt-In advertising solution, giving you the choice of interrupting your video at anytime with advertising. To learn more about this product, I gave it a test drive and talked to Mark Trefgarne, one of the lead developers at LiveRails.

What Is LiveRails?

LiveRails is a really interesting take on monetizing video. How did the idea originate? What was the problem you were trying to solve?

Really it was just a case of trying to decide what we felt would be the best solution for the problems facing publishers, advertisers and video viewers online. So rather than having a single “idea” it was more a case of analyzing the market and trying to evolve an elegant and effective solution to meet its requirements. Fortunately, most people’s approach to online video advertising (i.e. pre-rolls) is just plain unimaginative, and fails to take any advantage of the online medium – so we knew there was an opportunity for a new company to take an innovative approach.

We spent a lot of time looking at what sort of things had worked well in other, more evolved forms of advertising (such as search advertising) and to see what lessons could be drawn from them for video. What really stood out for us was what Google had done with their AdWords system – found a way to make advertising that actually improves the user’s experience rather than detract from it. Too often advertising is seen as a chore or a irritation to be ignored and avoided – which, given video’s potential to entertain – is something that we felt didn’t need to be the case. A system where viewers actually watch adverts that interest them because they want to, not only makes their experience better, but is also more valuable to an advertiser.

Click Fraud

For systems like AdWords one of the biggest problems is click fraud. How do you guys plan to maximize advertiser value and make certain that they get the highest exposure for their dollar?

Of all the approaches to video advertising online, we strongly believe that LiveRail offers the best value proposition available for advertisers. We say this for a number of reasons, but primarily because LiveRail only charges advertisers when a viewer positively chooses to watch their ad because its relevant to them and their interests. Advertisers decide how much they wish to pay per viewer, and there is no minimum spend – so unlike a pre/end-roll campaign were an advertiser has to commit to buying thousands of views on a CPM basis, advertisers have much higher control of how and where their money is spent.

To quickly address your question of click fraud, this is something we take very seriously, and have put in place a number of innovative safeguards to minimize its impact on the platform. For obvious reasons we can’t discuss these in too much detail, but we believe that we have taken the steps necessary to build a system that is as fraud-proof as any on the market. If (and its not happened yet) someone were to find a way to defraud our advertisers, we constantly monitor advertiser and publisher statistics and a member of our team is automatically notified as soon as these spike outside normal averages – so there would be human investigation and intervention immediately if such a situation arose. No system is perfect, but we believe that the steps we have taken should ensure that the risk and cost of fraud on LiveRail is minimal.

Advertisers

Have you found it easy to convince advertisers to try your system. How are you going about courting advertisers to invest in this new model?

The take up among advertisers has actually been really strong – even more so than we’d hoped. Clearly with any new platform, in a very new market, there is a sense that advertising agencies are being cautious and not necessarily putting their biggest clients on straight away, but we’ve already had very positive feedback from a number of major agencies already. In terms of promotion, the system is currently invitation only, and for those agencies we have invited we’ve offered a free daily budget of $1000 so that they can explore the service’s features without eating into clients real budgets. This has helped off-set some of the trepidation that advertisers might have felt about working with a new platform.

The Question

I try to ask all of the entrepreneurs that I interview this. As entrepreneurs, do you have any advice for people who have an idea but just don’t know where to start or how to get it off the ground?

Well, every company’s challenges are unique, but if there is one piece of advice I can share, its to build the right team. No matter what challenges you and your business face (and there will be lots), if you are surrounded by a team of intelligent, passionate, talented and imaginative people who believe in what you’re doing, you’ll have everything you need to work through the tough times.

Web 2.0 Roundup

If you would like to learn more about LiveRails, visit their site and request an invitation to their BETA. I would like to thank Mark for answering all of my questions.

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