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September 24, 2007

Rocketboom Moves to Blip.tv

Erick Schonfeld

21 comments »

rocketboom_bliptv.pngThe popular daily videoblog Rocketboom is joining online video network blip.tv, which will now host all of Rocketboom’s videos and sell ads for the show. Rocketboom joins a growing crowd of other top videoblogs that can be found on Blip.tv, including Wallstrip, TreeHugger TV, Alive in Baghdad, and Goodnight Burbank. As with most of those shows, the relationship between Rocketboom and blip.tv is not exclusive. For instance, Rocketboom will continue to sell ads on its own site. But the more top-quality shows that blip.tv can sell ads against, the stronger its position becomes in the embryonic world of Web-only video.

rocketboom_screen.pngWith its launch this morning on blip.tv, Rocketboom gains a new sponsor in Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program. And blip.tv is concurrently launching a new ad unit, an Flash-like overlay that can be seen on Quicktime downloads (the kind you get off iTunes). According to blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, these ads will be viewable on iTunes even though Apple generally prefers the paid-download model to ads. Blip.tv has offered pre-roll and post-roll ads on video downloads for about a year, but this is the first time a mid-clip overlay is available. Overlays, which usually look like a banner that pop up during the video, are preferable because, Hudack tells TechCrunch “pre-rolls have the potential to turn off viewers and post-rolls don’t get watched.” Eventually, blip.tv will have the capability to track how many times each ad is viewed or clicked on as well. Up till now, such metrics have been more common for streaming videos than for downloads.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Mike Hudack

    September 24th, 2007 at 5:15 am

    Thanks Erick! We’re extremely excited about our new partnership with Rocketboom. We’ve blogged about the partnership and so has Andrew Michael Baron of Rocketboom.

    I wanted to clarify my comments on ad formats, if I may. Short postrolls (2-3 seconds) can get a message out without annoying too many viewers, and postrolls do get watched, just not as much as prerolls. There’s a delta between the two, and it varies from show to show. Some shows see 40% of their viewers see the postroll ad, some less, some more (I’ve seen one show that consistently carries about 75% of its viewers through to the postroll). That said, each format does have considerable drawbacks, and we think that the overlay is a very happy medium between the two. I wouldn’t always want to do overlays exclusively, though. In the case of Rocketboom we’re doing an overlay combined with a postroll. The overlay lets people know what’s going on, and the postroll drives the message home.

    Yours,

    Mike Hudack
    Co-founder & CEO, blip.tv

  2. Bill Cammack

    September 24th, 2007 at 5:31 am

    Power Moves!

    Congrats, all! :D

  3. meanguy

    September 24th, 2007 at 5:36 am

    An online ad platform that doesn’t count views or clicks? Fantastic!

    Incidentally: rocketboom.com hasn’t been in the Alexa top 100,000 sites for quite some time. Can we stop talking about it now? Please?

    If the most interesting thing about your show is your ad platform, you’ve got real problems.

  4. Mike Hudack

    September 24th, 2007 at 5:39 am

    Hey meanguy,

    We actually do track clicks, and we track viewership as well. What we’re not doing right now is loading the overlay in QuickTime dynamically — it’s baked in. That means that we don’t have a direct stat on the number of overlays seen, as opposed to the number of videos. But we do have CTR and all that good stuff!

    Yours,

    Mike Hudack
    Co-founder & CEO, blip.tv

  5. Michael Bailey

    September 24th, 2007 at 5:49 am

    Yeah meanguy - you are pretty quick to judge here.

    If your measure for success of an ad campaign is the number of clicks, perhaps you should try tracking actual sales - unless you are in the online advertising space, and a success to you is the selling of a batch of clicks.

    BTW, Alexa rankings? Please stop it, you’re cracking me up here!

  6. Chris Przybycien

    September 24th, 2007 at 6:57 am

    I wouldn’t have considered Rocketboom popular even during the reign of Congdon.

  7. Grace Piper

    September 24th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    BlipBoom or RocketBlip, both sound good to me.
    This is big news for online video producers and fans. Awesome.

  8. Justin Kownacki

    September 24th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    And, while we’re on the topic, I see Rocketboom in the 74,000 range on Alexa…

    Good luck to all parties involved. It seems like Blip continues to establish itself as a preferred haven for content creators, and Rocketboom gets a little extra heft from the existing Blip userbase. Good moves all around, eh?

  9. Mike Hudack

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:24 am

    Hey guys,

    I wanted to clarify my comments on ad formats, if I may. Short prerolls (2-3 seconds) can get a message out without annoying too many viewers — longer prerolls (15-30 seconds) do certainly annoy viewers. Postrolls do get watched, just not as much as prerolls.

    There’s a delta between the two, and it varies from show to show. Some shows see 40% of their viewers see the postroll ad, some less, some more (I’ve seen one show that consistently carries about 75% of its viewers through to the postroll).

    That said, both of these formats do have considerable drawbacks, and we think that the overlay is a very happy medium between the two. I wouldn’t always want to do overlays exclusively, though. In the case of Rocketboom we’re doing an overlay combined with a postroll. The overlay lets people know what’s going on, and the postroll drives the message home.

    Yours,

    Mike

  10. whoopie

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:51 am

    who the hell actually watches this crap?

  11. john g

    September 24th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    agree with you on the overlay mike, and the way you wrote this so elegantly, “Postrolls do get watched, just not as much as prerolls.” hahaha. congrats and as always a huge fan of blip and what you guys do.
    you guys always do the right thing and you will be rewarded. keep up the good work.

  12. Jaded TV Viewer

    September 24th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    I do. I enjoy watching TV from time to time, but am tired of being fed the same old formulaic crap on network TV (for the most part) and I no longer believe anything news reported from the major outlets. So, the breadth and varety user-generated TV - entertainment and news - informs and entertains me, and doesn’t leave me feeling like I have been used.

  13. Josh Paul

    September 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    Hello, I’m the CEO of Aweli and have been working closely with Blip over the last few weeks to bring the overlay technology to market. The overlay technology is based heavily on our dynamic product placement research, which can be seen here. We believe that overlays and dynamic product placement will provide the next leap in online video advertising services.

  14. phenom

    September 24th, 2007 at 2:45 pm

    nice

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