Online video advertising is only just beginning to see the light of day. Despite being early days there are still a growing number of companies beginning to fight it out to become the key players in online video advertising.
We’ve seen early pioneers with video sharing sites such as Revver and Metacafe offering to share advertising revenue with its video creators, and also seen YouTube beginning to get involved.
Putting the video sharing giants aside, focused video advertising start-ups are popping up faster than crappy reality TV shows.
We’ve already mentioned a handful here on WebTVWire.com including LiveRail, vComm, Adjustables, ScanScout and Yume Networks, never mind all the stuff Google has up its sleeve.
With all this competition heating up you expect any entrant into the video advertising market to be bringing something very hot and spicy to the table.
FLVorful.com Beta – WebTVWire Review
FLVorful describes itself as the “internet’s video ad marketplace” offering a place to buy and sell video advertising.
Video publishers can sell ad space within their video and advertisers can hunt down individual videos to advertise in, or alternatively advertise in all videos within a certain category. Although not particularly innovative it sounds simple and could be a good idea.
Unfortunately as I looked deeper into the site I was unable to find anything particularly good about this start up. Honestly I don’t see much future in FLVorful for the following reasons:
Limited Advertising Options
The advertising options available are limited to simply placing a regular video advert within an existing video. The ad can be up to 30 seconds long and can be placed anywhere within the video – presumably at the choice of the publisher.
This is not ideal because many internet surfers are so fickle that a 10 second advert would be enough to turn them away, never mind a 30 second advert.
I wouldn’t want to rule these adverts out altogether as they will have their place in longer videos that can captivate an audience, but I think any video advertiser should also be thinking of overlay adverts and other innovative options that we are seeing from other new video advertising start-ups.
Poor FLVorful Video Player
The videos that have FLVorful advertising need to use the limited FLVorful player. Other than being slow and not working properly half the time it also appears to lack the ability to allow other people to embed it and put it on their website. If this option is available it is not made very clear.
This hugely limits the exposure of the video.
Lack of Advertisers & Publishers
Any advertising network needs a lot of publishers to attract advertisers, and a lot of advertisers to attract publishers. FLVorful does not appear to have either. In terms of publishers the only one I could find was Pitch Control TV.
If I was to buy the entire ad inventory on FLVorful I doubt I could even get 500 impressions of my advert in a day. Advertisers look for big numbers where they can get their ad seen in the thousands, if not millions so FLVorful has a lot of work to do in order to attract publishers.
Buggy System
The system is very buggy. I was finding videos not loading properly and the site being very unresponsive.
For example when it came to registering as a publisher I entered all my details but forgot to put in my postcode, as normal a message pops up saying please enter your postcode.
However, once corrected FLVorful now wouldn’t let me register with the same email address because it had accidentally recorded it into the system. It took 3 email addresses before I actually got an account.
I find it hard to put faith in a company handling the delivery or sale of my ad space if it can’t even handle creating a simple signup page.
Lack of information
Inside FLVorful it is relatively simple but there is little information in terms of what to do. I find it self explanatory (others might not) but there were a few things I wanted to know more info on and the help files were practically non existent.
Conclusion
With all the competition out there I do not see much of a future for FLVorful.com. There are plenty more well presented, flexible and professional solutions out there which are already attracting big advertisers and big publishers.
[FLVorful]
