Affordable online advertising for SMBs

BANGALORE, INDIA: With recent advances in technologies and consumer viewing preferences, video has emerged as a powerful medium for advertising on the Internet. California-based Jivox, which started Indian operations earlier this year is a self-service online video advertising platform for businesses.

Naren Nachiappan, CEO of Jivox throws light on trend of online video advertising on Internet in a chat with CIOL.  Excerpts from the interview:

CIOL: How affordable is online video advertising?

Naren Nachiappan: The Jivox platform allows anybody to create professional video advertisements totally free of cost. Jivox pinpoints the sites your customers go to in the markets you need to reach them. Through the exclusive Jivox network your ad will appear "on the digital air."

The small business does not want to spend lakhs of rupees on creating and publishing an ad so online advertising is certainly cost effective than conventional advertising.

CIOL: What process does one has to follow to create an ad?

NN: With Jivox one can easily create free professional video advertisements for your business with music, visuals, and more using the AdState. An ad can ideally stretch from 15-30 seconds. Further, the platform also allows the advertiser to make any special announcements/ changes on the advertisements at any given time at no extra cost.

CIOL: What is the investment that has gone to create the platform. Do you have tie-ups with portals?

NN: We have invested about $3 million to develop the product and further $10.7 million for the business. This is the first year of our business in India and response for the initiative is encouraging. We have tied up with AOL, Rajashree, Suleka for publishing the advertisements.

CIOL: What were the technical challenges you faced in creating the Jivox platform?

NN: The first and foremost challenge was in creating the Flash based platform. Our engineers have made a lot of effort in decompressing the 15-30 second videos to about 300KB compared to 1.5MB size of a typical video. We are able to do this without loosing much quality of the video.

CIOL: What is your revenue model? Do you think allowing users to create free ads can go well in the long run?

NN: Our revenues come from the charge we levy on publishing that is also shared with the publisher (portals). Despite the charge, online videos advertising works out to be more affordable than the conventional way of creating and advertising.

CIOL: What future do you foresee for online video advertising in India?

NN: Video ads are more attractive and can attract more number of hits. According to studies, static ads get only 0.1-0.2 percentage hits compared to 2 percent hit rate for video ads. The online advertising is has seen a tremendous growth in US and this can be reality in India soon.