How Video Site NDN is Driving 500 Million+ Video Views Per Month

The prime 4 U.S. on-line video content material properties in comScore’s December 2013 U.S. online video rankings are well-known model names: Google websites, pushed primarily by video viewing at YouTube; Facebook; AOL; and Yahoo websites. But digital entrepreneurs will be forgiven in the event that they aren’t as conversant in the fifth largest property, NDN.

NDN ranks forward of Amazon websites, VEVO, Microsoft websites, Vimeo, and Turner Digital within the newest on-line video rankings. So, it’s price figuring out extra about an internet video platform that claims it “is disrupting the digital media trade in all the proper methods.”

Search Engine Watch (SEW) interviewed Stephen Bach (SB), the top of Business Development at NDN. Here are our questions and his solutions:

SEW: NDN was based in 2007 “to supply free options for on-line publishers and content material creators.” What’s the backstory? Why did the founders imagine “that know-how must be free”?

SB: NDN was integrated in 2007 and launched in 2008 with a powerful give attention to protection of politics. Our official kickoff was the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver. Distribution of video to premium publishers was at all times a part of the mannequin, nevertheless it rapidly turned clear that video was the important thing alternative. Also, our companions instantly appeared to us for all classes of video, not simply politics and onerous information.

We re-calibrated and expanded our focus: looking for out one of the best content material suppliers in quite a lot of classes and capitalizing on the prevailing visitors of very giant publishers, which created loads of progress early on. We at all times sought to match one of the best content material to one of the best publishers, and in doing so, we created a premium providing for advertisers: one which allowed them to purchase video at scale throughout one of the best information web sites within the nation with a single insertion order.

At the identical time, publishers had been scuffling with their on-line video companies. Very typically, we’d see costly video platform contracts, costly content material licenses, and plenty of incremental price that publishers must pay, up entrance, to be able to energy video on their web site. In mixture with anemic (or non-existent) video gross sales on the native stage, video was typically an upside-down enterprise.

NDN started as a market for the alternate of premium video. But as we realized extra in regards to the deficiencies of the prevailing on-line video mannequin; it turned clear that with sufficient scale and advertiser demand, the know-how might be given away, displacing premium on-line video suppliers We discovered that we might truly pay publishers as an incentive to characteristic as a lot video as doable.

SEW: In 2009, NDN launched the Digital Media Exchange. What was the preliminary response by publishers?

SB: We had sturdy early adoption by Chicago Sun-Times, Cox, McClatchy and the pre-AOL Huffington Post. These offers gave us a really giant footprint in a brief time frame.

SEW: In 2010, AP chosen NDN as its syndication accomplice for AP’s 4,500 member and affiliate member websites. Was {that a} key second in NDN’s historical past?

SB: That was positively a essential second. With the endorsement of then-CEO Tom Curley, AP’s executives and bureau chiefs actively inspired their members to hitch the NDN platform. We gained hundreds of recent publishers in just a few months. AP issued a press launch that stated the brand new partnership would create the “broadest providing of video information accessible anyplace.” That was an immediate injection of credibility and adjusted NDN’s course in a really constructive approach.

SEW: In 2011, NDN acquired Inform Technologies, a pure language processing and semantic analysts firm. In 2012, NDN acquired Mochila, the online’s main syndication market for textual content and picture. Did these acquisitions assist speed up NDN’s progress?

SB: Absolutely. Mochila’s infrastructure is the muse for key NDN companies, together with Perfect Pixel, which provides our newsroom the flexibility to remotely embed movies on articles for taking part publishers. (See the story by Lucia Moses in Adweek, “Video hungry newspapers let outsider play editor” .)

Inform’s wealthy taxonomy – which incorporates greater than three million entities and variants – is a essential part of automating the method of matching associated movies to our companions’ articles.

SEW: Today, NDN is the fifth largest on-line video property within the US, in keeping with comScore’s December 2013 U.S. on-line video rankings. How is NDN driving greater than 530 million video views per thirty days throughout over 49 million distinctive viewers?

SB: NDN has very broad attain throughout hundreds of America’s largest publishers. In reality, 45 of the most important 50 U.S. newspaper web sites use NDN. Many of them embrace our participant on most pages. That’s a big footprint in itself, however newspapers are solely half the story. We additionally get important visitors from digital-first, “new media” websites, together with a few of the largest and hottest political blogs.

We’re additionally excited to see increasingly more companions adopting NDN as their major video platform. From the Chicago Tribune and Christian Science Monitor to Breitbart and Journal Broadcast Group; digital publishers are more and more relying NDN to energy their whole video content material administration system: leveraging our know-how to host and current each unique video content material, in addition to quite a lot of clips from our library of premium suppliers.

SEW: How is NDN shaping the way forward for content material distribution and web site monetization? Why has your built-in multimedia answer confirmed that it helps companions drive person engagement and generate income?

SB: NDN has created a premium ecosystem offering entry to one of the best publishers and content material in an especially environment friendly shopping for atmosphere. This opens up nationwide promoting budgets to regional publishers, and encourages these publishers to guide with video in a much more aggressive approach. We have already begun to host full pages and immersive video experiences for publishers. These characteristic responsive (mobile-friendly) design together with show alternatives for advertisers. These hosted experiences create extra alternatives for our promoting companions and construct on NDN’s mission of eradicating price for publishers, whereas producing extra engagement and income.