Comscore released their monthly report on web traffic and video property traffic from April 2013, and it seems that there is quite a bit of fluctuation in the video traffic space. Dailymotion’s month got even more rough – fresh off a severe rejection by Yahoo who in-turn acquired Tumblr (rebound acquisition much?) – the French video site lost its #2 slot (the #1 slot is held by Google, of course) to Videology, and now sits at #3 with a nearly stable amount of traffic compared to March. Another surprising change in the Video property space was French startup StickAdsTV, who last week announced a 3.1M round of funding led by Ventech as well as previous investor ISAI.
I sat down with Ventech Analyst Audrey Soussan yesterday, and she seemed quite excited about the recent wave of investments that Ventech has seen (they also announced a Series C investment in Bonitasoft). According to Soussan, Ventech as up against at least one international VC who was interested in the investment, and with this latest ComScore report, I can see why: StickyAds landed at #9 with 9.2B page views in April 2013, outranking eBuzzing, Vimeo, TF1 & many more. StickyAds recently launched their video ad exchange and have partnered up with several leading video web content producers – TV stations, etc. – to provide a place for video ad producers to bid for pre-roll spots.
Soussan told me during our lunch that, while Google Ad Exchange has been quite normalized, the video ad market is still quite nascent, and while some will be content to have their Car Commercial pre-roll on YouTube before a video of a 13 year old kid skateboarding, some ad producers would like a little more targetting and a bit more qualified of an audience, which is where StickyAdsTV comes in. In addition, the company has been working on innovative technology, Soussan tells me, that allow pre-roll video ads to be synced up with TV ads, so that TV ad producers can catch the audience that is watching TF1 replay TV, for example, on their Tablet, at the same hour they run their TV ad on the TF1 station.
It is clear that 2013 may not be the year of Mobile, but it is definitely the year of Video.