Oneupweb Reviews: Veoh

—This is a guest post by Natalie

I’ll be honest—until quite recently, the only video watching I’ve really ever done online was through YouTube. In a quest to broaden my social media horizons, however, I decided to do a little investigation on another video site called Veoh.

Veoh is an online video service that gives users the power to easily find and watch video content and personalize their viewing experience. Veoh offers television shows from major broadcast and cable networks (CBS, ABC, WB, MTV, etc…), content from independent made-for-Internet studios or independently-produced videos from across the web. There are seemingly few limits to subject matter.

So, rather than review it from the viewer’s perspective, I decided to review Veoh from a potential advertiser’s perspective. Does Veoh allow advertisements on their site? Well, obviously yes, given the Classmates.com ad in the above screenshot. That question answered, who is their audience? Who would be best suited for advertising on Veoh? What types of advertising do they offer? After a little exploration of the site, I found some answers to these questions.

According to Veoh, their audience is young, influential, and highly engaged, which would indicate that there is quite a bit of potential within their site. Additionally, Veoh offers many advertising opportunities, including:

• Targeted advertising—Veoh doesn’t specify all the targeting capabilities they offer, but they launched a behavioral targeting beta in July of 2008 that they claim can, among other things, “build custom audience categories around an advertiser’s specific marketing objectives.”
• High Impact Takeover advertising—While there are a couple of different types of high impact takeover advertising, Veoh doesn’t specify what version they offer.
• In-Stream Video Ads—In-stream video ads occur while the user is engaged and watching a video, so 30 seconds into a video, an ad might start running at the bottom of the screen.
• Custom Sponsorship advertising—Again, Veoh doesn’t specify what they offer as far as custom sponsorship option, but if they offer traditional sponsorship opportunities, perhaps a sports drink manufacturer could sponsor a video on the Sports/Fitness TV Channel.

With these four advertising options, and their proclaimed demographic, it seems that nearly anyone could find Veoh a useful outlet for placing ads. However, Veoh does not list prices on their site, so you would have to contact a sales representative to find out whether Veoh is affordable for you or not. Additionally, since Veoh doesn’t specify what type of targeting they offer, they may not be the best choice for, say, a brick-and-mortar in Cleveland (unless they can geotarget).

According to Veoh, the site has more than 28 million users worldwide, 350 million videos, and 100 minutes is the average time spent per visitor on their site. Armed with these statistics, unwary advertisers may assume that just strafe-bombing their ad through this site without any targeting may seem like the best option; however, think carefully before you do this. You wouldn’t want your ads running in videos that rarely attract users or have questionable content —Veoh’s TOU forbids “pornographic” content, but it doesn’t take much searching to turn up some fairly risquè videos. They also offer a “Family Filter,” which indicates some content may be objectionable to some people.

Before advertising on Veoh, just remember to ask yourself, “Who is my audience and what would they be watching?” Then try to place your ads right in front of these customers. If you don’t have a specific audience, be sure that your ads are running on more popular videos that don’t contain any distasteful content (unless, of course, that’s the audience you’re looking for). Additionally, be sure to ask Veoh how you can be certain your ads won’t show up on these videos and what they would do to compensate you if they did. Be certain that you could terminate your contract at any time if your ads aren’t performing.

So, while on the surface Veoh sounds like it could be a good addition to your integrated advertising mix, there are a few too many unanswered questions for me to fully recommend it. Oneupweb Thumb Sideways.

Feel free to comment below if you’ve had any personal experience advertising on Veoh!