New Media Age: IPC Media to extend video output following Collective tie-up
8 March, 2012
IPC Media has extended its deal with ad technology company Collective as it prepares to ramp up its video output across its brand portfolio.
The deal will see IPC’s video inventory monetised with pre-roll ads across Collective’s video platform, which offers exclusive access to publishers’ video channels including women’s portal iVillage, the Independent, Sony Music and E! Entertainment.
IPC Media’s digital commercial development director Nick Bradley said there is a “huge demand” for premium video content in the market, an opportunity the publisher wants to capitalise on.
Collective’s platform incorporates real-time bidding for video. Bradley said real-time-bidding works best for its smaller brands, bringing value to the long tail, “Being able to audience target on a site like that is very valuable.”
The magazine publisher is also closely monitoring the potential for exploring connected TVs, which would be a natural step for its video strategy. “We’re thinking about connected TVs, because they represent the future. This convergence of the web and TV screen will eventually see the TV replace the desktop as the main internet screen,” he added.
The deal marks one of the first since Collective acquired video ad network Web TV Enterprise last spring (nma.co.uk 29 March 2011). The buyout has given Collective access to Web TV’s 25-strong premium network, with a large proportion of revenues coming from broadcast.
The news comes as Comscore revealed 34m people watched online videos in January this year, accounting for 80% of the total UK population.
Google generated the highest number of visits with 30m unique viewers, driven by YouTube, which accounted for 99.5% of all videos watched on its platform, and saw 8.4bn videos viewed during January.
The amount of online viewers has not grown over the past six months according to Comscore’s Video Metrix, although the average number of videos viewed surged 28%. Meanwhile, the amount of time the average viewer spent engaging with online videos jumped 42%.
Online video platform Vevo ranked second after Google with 11.7m unique viewers, with a total 177m videos viewed on its site throughout the month.
Facebook attracted 8.3m unique viewers, which watched 45m videos in total across the social network.
By Jessica Davies for New Media Age
