(1) Get out of my way. No pop-ups, pop-unders, page-covering expanders, moving obstacles, or interstitials. Avoid moving, flashing, distracting ads, also. If you interfere with my enjoyment of the site, you’ve lost my business.

(2) Entertaining, humorous ads get a little bit of a pass. But this does not mean that putting Frank Caliendo between me and the content I’m there to see is going to work.

(3) Advertising is already pervasive and intrusive. If you want to improve my response to your advertising, choose sites that limit the amount of ads they carry. Compare this to morning drive time on the radio. Play five to seven commercials, then play one or two songs. Then let the DJ talk for a couple of minutes, followed by another five to seven commercials. Sorry, but the content gets buried in the advertising, and YOUR message gets buried in the fifteen other advertising messages I just heard.

(4) The only effective advertising is NOT instant-response advertising. When you open your newspaper or magazine, do you immediately go down to the nearest store to pick up the products advertised? No, you pick up a few of the many products advertised at a later time, when you happen to be at the store anyway. As long as Big G and other online ad purveyors portray this as an immediate-response advertising medium, they will mislead their customers (advertisers) and those customers are destined to be disappointed.

There are already plenty of sites I refuse to visit because of their ads. Either they have too many ads, or their advertising is intrusive, or their advertising misuses my computer’s resources (lots of “rich media” ads are like this, as are many JavaScript ads). Or perhaps their ads are deceptive. (”Spyware detected on your computer. Click here to scan.”) We all know that sites have to pay for themselves or close. We can all accept the need for advertising and other monetizing activities. What we cannot accept is the idea that putting more ads in more places is the answer.

If the Web advertising industry does not see this, they are doomed.

Are you processing motion vectors on the client side or what? Nice blue bar showing the ad timeline, who’s idea was that?

Congrats on the launch,
-Jason

Please visit our gallery to see some short demos of what the viewer experience is like with our ad format.

http://www.keys...om/gallery.html

-Schuyler

Also Robyn, from a professional stand point, I find it odd you didn’t reach out to the company before bashing them publicly on TechCrunch.

I think content generators or an amateur movie maker like me are looking for investments all the time. If I were to remake “Sex and the city” and make sure that Sarah jessica parker carried a GUCCI bag in a scene which can be clicked on and bought, that’s quite amazing for the viewer. At the same time I can get some money from GUCCI, maybe.

In the above situation, I am not sure how keystream can help though ? Schuyler ,any thoughts.

R..

I want to take a minute and clarify two points about the platform and feedback we’ve received from broadcasters and Web video publishers.

First, although it’s the platform’s goal to identify as many potential ad insertion locations as possible, they are not intended to all be used during one viewing session. Different locations and different ads will be used for each viewer. The Web video publisher can control the frequency with which ads appear taking into consideration user demographic and geographic information and their monetization strategy. They also have control over the general location where ads can appear on the video, forbidding, for example placements in the center 9th.

Second, the publishers who are deploying our platform have seen a big increase in user interactions (roll-overs and click-throughs) as compared to pre-rolls and banner overlay ads and no negative feedback. As an example, ITV, in the UK hasn’t received any complaint from viewers about our ads, whereas in the past they received a lot of complaints about pre-rolls and banner overlays.

Anyone who expects video without some form of advertising is being unrealistic. The question is how do you make the video advertising less painful to the viewer as possible. Our customers believe that our SmartAd platform does just that.

Robin, since we didn’t get a chance to speak, I would be more than happy to discuss things further with you. Feel free to email me at schuyler@keystream.com.

- Schuyler Cullen, CEO, Keystream

I think we’re going to see this kind of annoying advertising used to get low-volume video content creators to upgrade to paid services. The same way Vimeo recently introduced Vimeo Plus and encouraged adoption by crippling some of the features of the free accounts, I think we’re going to see Keystream ads used to force people to upgrade.