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  • Markus Bäckström
  • 5 January 2011

Monetizing Mobile Video, Part 2

This post is the second part of an article about mobile video monetization (part 1 was published in our blog in October).

In this post, I will focus on monetizing mobile video content by displaying ads together with the actual video content. However, before going into the implementation details a simple business case for ad-funded mobile video is required.

The amount of revenue you can make in a month from advertising can be calculated as follows:

  • Revenue = CPM * Ad views / 1,000

CPM is the amount of money that the advertiser is willing to pay you for showing their ad to 1,000 people. Ad views is the number of times that the ad was seen by someone. For example, if 10,000 people view ten video clips along with the ad thats 10,000 * 10 = 100,000 views.

So using some real figures the equation becomes:

  • CPM = $30 (an average level for video, compare to static banner ads which are normally less than $10)
  • Ad views = 100,000 (using our example)
  • Revenue = $30 * 100,000 / 1,000 = $3,000

Not bad for one month.

On the cost side, assuming that each video clip is five minutes long, you would need to deliver 5 * 100,000 views = 500,000 minutes of video.

Using ThirdPresence for the mobile video delivery, the cost is $599.

So you are left with $3,000 - $599 = $2,401 to cover the costs of the content, promotion, ad sales etc.

Now that we are satisfied that there is money to be made, let's look at the actual implementation steps for a simple static ad campaign:

  1. Upload your content video clips to ThirdPresence, along with the URL of your pre-roll ad clip.

  2. Create a campaign id for the ad campaign
    Example: campaign1

  3. Publish the video links provided by ThirdPresence on your mobile site or in your mobile app. At this point, you can bind the content to the campaign id you created in the previous step by adding it to the video URL.
    Example: http://myaccount.thirdpresence.com/dls/t/watch.jsp?iid=123456&campaign=campaign1

  4. When end-users access your content, the pre-roll ad will be played before the content. Our tracking will make sure that the campaign will receive one additional impression each time the ad is viewed.

  5. At the end of the month, get the results of your campaign from ThirdPresence analytics and invoice the advertiser.

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