LiveRail Announces Funding and A New Monetization Platform for Video Websites

LiveRail, the startup claiming to revolutionize video advertising, has two things to announce. First of all, good news for the startup itself is funding of $500 thousand from Pond Venture Partners. Hopefully the money will be used to bring its video advertising products to the next level.

Another announcement today is a new video content monetization platform Junction that is intended to consolidate and optimize video advertising for publishers enabling them to increase (and hopefully maximize) their revenue when using ads from multiple sources.

It works by selecting which ads to serve in the videos if a publisher uses multiple sources of ads. In this manner not only publishers will be able to serve the highest-paying ad for each available slot, in theory they will also increase the fill rate for their properties. The platform also provides consolidated reports to track revenue from those multiple sources of advertising.

LiveRail promises that the platform will support absolutely any ad network publisher may work with (while the general approach for such service is to offer a choice range of supported ad networks). In this manner a single integration of the video player in place with LiveRail’s Junction will be enough to serve all the ads instead of constantly integrating new ad networks. I am not sure how true these claims are so I hope we will soon see opinions from those publishers that have chosen to work with Junction. The Junction platform is offered for free while publishers will be able to eventually choose to pay for the ad server the company provides as well.

This is a very interesting development for LiveRail. Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee reminds us that the initial line of business of the company has been drastically changed. At the very beginning LiveRail offered a marketplace to connect video publishers with potential advertisers but this approach did not prove to work efficiently enough and late last year the marketplace was shut by LiveRail. Presumably the company decided to focus on other tools while still sticking to the video publishing industry.

There are other examples of similar products aimed at video publishers as well, including YuMe (not only serves the best-paying ads but sells ads itself as well), Adap.tv, and FreeWheel. Obviously, there are similar solutions for more generalist content, like Pubmatic which acts in a similar way for any publisher to choose the best ads from various supported ad networks. I hope this new platform will prove to be the right decision for LiveRail and if the quality of service is as good as they promise, the platform will be able to survive and stand out against competitors. I do think that a company that is willing to adapt to new conditions and work accordingly instead of pursuing the initial direction deserves reaching success eventually.