Video Ad Network VDOPIA Raises Funding From Nexus India Capital

You’re reading it here first: MediaNama has learned from multiple, reliable sources that online advertising network VDOPIA has raised a first round of funding from Nexus India Capital. According to some industry sources, the deal is upwards of $3 million, though we’re not sure of the exact amount. We’ve contacted Suvir Sujan of Nexus India Capital and Saurabh Bhatia from VDOPIA, and are awaiting a response.

VDOPIA competes with Jivox, which has raised a total of $10.7 million from Opus Capital and Helion Venture Partners. Ozone Media, which had reportedly raised around $4 million from IDG Ventures, also has a video ad network.

At a time when advertising appears to be emerging as the key source of monetization for Indian video content on the Internet, the role of advertising networks cannot be overstated. VDOPIA powers advertising on several video content sites including NDTV, NDTV Profit, IBNLive, Josh18, Indya.com, Starboxoffice.com, Cricket Nirvana, SpiceZee, BigFlix, My Popkorn, Rajshri, IPLT20.com. Advertising has also been drying up.

Update: We haven’t heard back from Sujan, and Saurabh Bhatia of VDOPIA has declined to confirm or deny the funding. 

In this context, also read the following posts on video content:

– TinselVision’s Closure Should Serve As A Warning For Video Content Portals
– Times Now On Nautanki.tv; Thoughts On Video Content Online

7Seas Ties Up With GreyStripe; What GreyStripe And Hovr Need…

Hyderabad based gaming co 7Seas Technologies has inked a two-way deal with games distributor GreyStripe. To begin with, 7Seas will provide seven games to Greystrip to distribute alongwith its catalog of games - Neetu-The Alien Killer, Kraze, Derby 3D, Treasure Trove, Great Elude, 3D SuDoKu, Planets of SuDoKu 3D. 7Seas will also distribute Greystripes games through 7Seas’ mobile web portal Mobzill.com. Reliance Entertainment company Zapak had earlier tied up with Greystripe for a similar offering…how is what 7Seas is offering to its users any different from what Zapak is offering?

Greystripe competes with Hovr, which has a similar business model.

How GreyStripe And Hovr Operate…

Greystripe and its competitor Hovr are essentially building a GPRS based advertising network around free mobile games. They’re allowing users access to free mobile games, and the network delivers advertisements to the the handset. These ads are served up before and after the game. Some thoughts on their business model:

– Quality matters more than quantity: whether Greystripe has 900 games or 300, the quality of the games matters more than the quantity. The quantity should be a means of aggregating the long tail, but having 5 versions of street fighter doesn’t help. Also, the more the number of games, the more difficult it becomes to discover quality content. Even if the games are free, what brings a user back to try out more games? Quality. 

– Scale is key: it’s important for Hovr and Greystripe to get as many users on board as possible. The media tie-ups with the likes of NDTV, Indiatimes and even 7Seas are just a means of expanding the user base, and reducing marketing spends for an advertising revenue share. Ideally, you’d expect quality content to be viral, particularly if it is free…

– Operator tie-ups? Perhaps it’s a better idea for Hovr or Greystripe to tie-up with mobile operators…who can offer them the scale that media houses cannot. The problem is that mobile operators are not likely to be interested, because free games would compete with their own mobile game decks, with paid games. It is unlikely that operators would enter into such a deal without a minimum guarantee, since the advertising revenue stream is not guaranteed. 

Do you think advertisers would be interested in advertising on a platform provided by Greystripe or Hovr? 

Related: 
– Zapak Adds Single Player Mobile Games From Greystripe
– NDTV Active Gets Mobile Games From Hovr 

News Corp To Launch .FoxNetworks In India; Differentiation?

News Corp has launched its ad network .FoxNetworks in India, with Pooja Puri as Head of Sales, reports Afaqs. Puri, who moved from HindustanTimes.com, has told Afaqs that they will initially do display and lead generation campaigns, and roll out other services later. 

Which other services?

1.  Going through the .FoxNetworks site, we came across a differentiated positioning for the network: Brandformance. It appears that .FoxNetworks aggregates the long tail of high value sites…how many such sites exist in India, and will the company put feet on the ground to aggregate the long tail in India?

2. Rich Media apps - widget ads, social media ad applications and viral apps. 

3. Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing

They also have two other ad networks:

1. Worthnet.fox: is a vertical ad network for the financial and investment community, and it may just be worthless now, given the financial segment turmoil.

2. Utarget.FOX creates video inventory: two video ad networks are already in operation in India, namely, Jivox and VDOPIA.

How the Digital Advertising Space Has Changed

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Times Now On Nautanki.tv; Thoughts On Video Content Online

Times Now, the English news channel from the BCCL (Times of India) Group will be going live on Nautanki.tv’s network, Nautanki CEO Sunil Nair informs us. Nautanki.tv is an online video network, with widgets spread across more than 6000 sites. Available online will be Times Now’s prime time show The Newshour, and feature shows No Full Stops (health) and The Foodie (a food and travel show). Times Now intends to eventually expand its offering on the network. 

Nautanki.tv has a strategic investment from Hungama (Virtual Marketing India Ltd), and claims that around 20% of their publishers are bloggers covering news, analysis, finance etc. Nautanki.tv also has content available from another BCCL TV channel - Zoom TV, as well as STAR TVs Channel [V]. 

Thoughts On Online Video Content In India, and Advertising

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Reliance Entertainment To Enter Online Advertising With Kyphy

Update #2: While Reliance Entertainment declined to comment before this post went up, they subsequently told Alootechie that Kyphy is intended to be an ad network, not an ad marketplace. So, yet another publisher is entering the ad-network space.

Update: That Reliance BIG Entertainment is looking to enter the online advertising space is confirmed, but it appears that the agenda for Kyphy isn’t very clear - whether it is intended to be a network or an exchange. We’ll try and get more clarity from Sudipto Majumdar, former CTO of Zapak, who is leading this project.

Original story: Reliance BIG Entertainment is in the process of launching an advertising marketplace called Kyphy. According to their website, Kyphy will “create an automated advertising exchange to enhance the efficiency of both buying and selling inventory.”

There are a large number of advertising networks in India, but this is the first attempt at an online advertising exchange. This is essentially the marketplace model, which connects both advertiser, ad networks and publishers, and appears to be based on a concept similar to that of the Right Media Exchange; Yahoo had acquired Right Media for $680 million in April last year. Right Media takes a commission of around 10 percent cut from the transaction between advertisers and publishers.

Reliance BIG Entertainment has online properties like BIGFlix (Online Movie Streaming), BIGAdda (social networking), Zapak (Casual and Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming), and will probably sell inventory from their properties as well - thus there is a case for a conflict of interest between the exchange business and publishing business. The exchange will have to be transparent and independent of their websites, and indeed, of an ad network if BIG Entertainment were to launch one.

There have been attempts at advertising exchanges on the Internet in the past in India - Dentsu India launched LastMinuteInventory.com earlier this year, to enable TV channels to sell last minute television inventory. There were some concerns though.

I wonder why Yahoo hasn’t launched Right Media in India, though. I’d former Yahoo CEO George Zacharias the same question when Yahoo had acquired a significant stake in ad network Tyroo, but he hadn’t offered a specific answer.

Update: Reliance Entertainment has declined to comment on Kyphy at this point in time.

Games2Win Launches Games Search Engine; Data Collection For Inviziads?

Clearstone funded online Gaming company Games2Win has launched a search engine for games, called GameCurry, report TechCrunch and VentureBeat. GameCurry indexes flash based games, but doesn’t scrape them like ZapakWorld, In.com and Addicting Games etc.

It’s an interesting experiment from Games2Win - depending on searches, they’ll be able to determine what kind of games people are searching for, and based on geographic location, identify demand and trends. That data can then be used for their in-game ad network Inviziads.

The problem for Games2Win is that some of the content just isn’t worth indexing in the first place. I did a search for one of the suggested queries - puzzle. Over half the results on the first page were for Yahoo Games without any relevant information. It’s one thing to have a search engine, quite another to display results that are useful to users. I wonder if Google has a games search engine in the works…

AdMob Raises $15.7 Million From Sequoia, Accel; Local Language Ads On Mobile?

Mobile ad network AdMob has raised $15.7 million in a Series C round of investment from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. AdMob will use the money to invest in hiring local staff in markets like Western Europe, India, South Africa and Japan. Last we heard, they were looking for a Country Manager for India. What I found interesting is the plan to also invest in adding new language interfaces for these markets.

An interesting situation exists in India on the Internet - advertisers prefer to place ads in English online. Take a look at some of the indic language content sites - AajTak, Jagran (Yahoo), OneIndia and WebDunia. The feedback we received a couple of months ago from some of the Indic language portals is that many advertisers don’t want to advertise in Indic languages - sometimes, purely because they don’t want to create separate creatives for separate languages. That appears to have changed now, and some of these sites do feature creatives in local languages.

The mobile Internet is still something of a mystery in India - the official government figures aren’t usable - and Industry sources say that the overall user base ranges from 10-15 million. AdMob, according to their published stats, serves 391 million monthly “requests” (impressions?) in India. India accounts for 7.7 percent of their requests, but remains number 3 in the pecking order, behind Indonesia and the US. The question is, how many advertisers do they have on board from India?