At the San Francisco New Tech Meetup Wednesday, Podaddies CEO Nate Pagel presented his new company, which puts ads into user-generated videos so that people can make a few bucks from their wacky cats' antics.
The service inserts a call to its ad engine at the end of a video, and displays a streaming QuickTime ad from its library. No matter where the file goes, the ad call goes with it. But not the ad itself; this way, the company gets to serve the ad on demand and can track ad plays and bill the advertiser for them (and cut the videos' creators in on the action).
It's all well and good until the video is transcoded, as it will be if it is posted on a sharing site such as YouTube. Pagel said that "other than that," the ad stays with the video wherever it goes--when it's e-mailed, shared via a P2P service, or transferred by USB drive. But the most important video channel these days is YouTube, and Podaddies hasn't yet figured out how to survive placement on that service.
Even if that problem is solved (big if), there's another challenge: few video ads are worth watching. Cadillac had a sweet 5-second ad that worked great when paired with a 1-minute video, but to date many video ads are shrunken-down 30-second TV spots, and they just don't work when paired with short online videos.
Related: Monetizing videos: The rush is on