Online Video Viewing Passes 50% of Total US Population
Mobile devices also become important video viewing channel

Having surpassed 50% penetration among the general population in 2011, online video viewing is now a mass-market pursuit. Increasing numbers of Americans are watching more content on more devices than ever before.

Even though growth rates will necessarily slow as the number of users swells from year to year, there is still room for expansion. By 2015, US online video viewers will represent 60% of the general population and 76% of internet users.

“Audience growth over the next four years will come from all demographic segments, but it will be more pronounced among preteen children, older boomers and seniors,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of a forthcoming report on premium video content. “These groups have traditionally lagged teens and younger adults in their video viewing activity, but the gaps will start to close as the market matures. This will give marketers opportunities to take advantage of growth pockets among viewers at either end of the age spectrum.”

Read More: eMarketer

Guardian Merging Yield Metrics For Print And Digital With Operative Says Beale

In November, Guardian announced a partnership with Operative where Guardian’s “print and digital media businesses, including guardian.co.uk, as well as The Guardian and The Observer newspapers, will all be running from the same platform – Operative.One – in the first half of 2012.” Read the release.

Andy Beal, Technology Director at Guardian News and Media, discussed the deal and its implications.

AdExchanger.com:  What was the turning point for bringing the print and digital operations together into one ad platform?

AB: If you go back to the start, it was driven initially by efficiency. What can we give the sales teams to make their lives easier and make them more efficient in a sales process? That was the initial driver. We had practical issues around the age of the system too. With nothing else going on, we needed to look to modernize. But the philosophy for the project changed about three years ago as it became more about supporting the growing digital revenue than it was about simply integrating systems, and then making those systems efficient. It became a revenue-driving project.

How does the revenue breaks down for you all in terms of digital versus print – especially over time?

The real story there is the direction the arrows are going. We still make a significant proportion of our revenue from the combined sale, but a lot is still from our print products. But digital is a growing area. And that is a structural position that is not going to change. Regardless of the detail, it’s about supporting our growing revenues. The actual product that we are providing our clients, in terms of that monetized audience, is a combined cross‑platform package almost always now. It’s not quite from a revenue perspective. Print versus digital – they have symbiotic relationship.

Read More: AdExchanger

SAY Media Releases Online Ad Targeting App For Non-TV Viewers 

SAY Media has unveiled a platform that identifies individuals on the company’s network who have stopped regularly consuming live television and then targets ads to them online. Working with Quantcast, the offering pulls together online and offline data to give advertisers insight into behavioral changes for video and television consumption.

SAY Media recently began testing the platform with one unnamed brand. The companies will monitor the target audience for behavioral changes. The platform targets through traditional Web browsing rather than mobile devices, but that will change as the technology develops.

In its development of the offering, Quantcast ran a statistical model against profiles that SAY Media developed that identify consumers who are “highly likely to be off the grid” — meaning those who have curtailed watching live television content.

Read More: MediaPost

How Big Data Analytics Can Save Publishing
Private Exchanges Are The First Step Toward Reclaiming The ‘Premium’ in Premium Publishing

Traditional newspaper and magazine publishers, responsible for most of the high-quality and original content we consume, have seen a huge decline in advertising revenues. While it’s the easy and obvious call to support premium publishers as they point fingers and blame VCs for investing in disruptive buy side tech, I’m going to go out on a limb and say something blunt: Publishers, you deserve every bit of this.

Publishers have not generated much of the almost infinite supply of channel-choking inventory, but they have also done next to nothing to preserve what is good and proprietary and “premium” about their own inventory. In some cases, they have chosen lowest common denominator ad networks, exchanges and supply side platforms to do the hard work of selling.

Publishers of high-quality content with large, desirable audiences need to reclaim their online ads inventory. Only big data tools can dig them out of the undifferentiated, over-supplied, machine- driven nightmare of the sell side by enabling publishers to scalably and cost-effectively analyze, price and allocate inventory in the new environment.

Read More: AdAge

Google Clears AdMeld, Shifts Focus To Publishers

Google received approval from the U.S. Department of Justice Friday to close the $400 million acquisition for AdMeld, which helps publishers sell display ad inventory at the best price. The deal also strengthens Google’s position to move beyond search and focus on display advertising through strong publisher relationships and what is now known as private ad exchanges.

AdMeld will support Google’s display ad network and the DoubleClick ad exchange, but also will work with other ad exchanges operated by Microsoft and Yahoo.

Google bought publisher relationships and expertise in supporting them, according to Jerry Neumann, an early-stage investor in technology companies at Neu Venture Capital. He said Google’s publisher side team typically focuses on volume business, but AdMeld spends more time working closely with publishers.

That closeness could quiet rumblings heard from publishers suggesting that private exchanges are not working as well, as many had hoped. Neumann said to expect continued consolidation in 2012.

When the dust settles, the industry might see two or three dominant players in the space, according to Adrian Tompsett, vice president, business development at DataXu.

Read More: MediaPost

You Are Watching More Web Video Ads, and You Are Okay With That

We’re watching more Web videos than ever: More than 42 billion a month in the U.S. And we’re watching more Web video ads, too.

That seems like an obvious correlation. But, until recently, that wasn’t the case, for a couple reasons. Some Web video sites had held back a bit from shoving ads in front of users’ faces, for fear of scaring them off. And lots of folks who wanted to buy video ads couldn’t find places they wanted to place them.

This is changing now, and that means the Web video business might finally be catching up to the long-running Web video boom.

Here, for instance, is promising news for ad buyers and sellers, via FreeWheel, a start-up that helps serve and manage video ads for the likes of Turner, Vevo and Fox. FreeWheel says that last quarter, for the first time, the rate of video ad views grew faster than overall video views — 128 percent versus 97 percent:

Read More: All Things D