Genesis shifts its attention platform toward video clips for publishers

In the zillion-channel universe, the scarcest commodity is attention.

To help publishers target their videos at the right moment, New York City-based Genesis Media is today announcing a video discovery dimension for its attention platform.

“Up to now, we had focused on bringing video ads into [online] magazines, blogs,” and other editorial content, CEO Mark Yackanich told VentureBeat. Now, the company is launching TVGenesis to offer video clips that its platform has determined are most appropriate for that page’s content, for that user. TVGenesis will be available in the first quarter of next year.

“It’s the right video at the right moment,” he said, as video joins coupons, social marketing messages, and every other kind of content in using data to determine when, how, and what should be shown — and to whom. The idea, Genesis says, is to deliver the video at the place on the page and to the user where it is “most likely to capture attention.”

In other words, welcome to The Age of Automatic Curation.

In TVGenesis’ case, a small thumbnail of a suggested video is overlaid on the page at the moment and in the place the platform decides. [See screenshot below.] When clicked by the user, it expands to cover most of the screen, with other suggested clips waiting in a queue on the side.

The content currently comes from a particular publisher’s inventory, thus reusing — and monetizing through video ad roll-ins from Genesis or the publisher — material that is otherwise just sitting.

In its alpha testing, Genesis said its platform has been present on 5.5 million page views, which resulted in about 250,000 videos being clicked, viewed, and being available as video real estate for video roll-in ads. Video-based ads are more lucrative than display or many other kinds of online ads.

The settings that determine what mix of traffic, visitor profiles, paths, or other data will call up specific kinds of content are set by Genesis in conjunction with the publishing partner, Yackanich told us. The factors, he said, include alignment with editorial content or the frequency with which the user has visited the site. More frequent visitors are assumed to be more engaged, for instance, and a more engaged user is more likely to be interested in additional video content.

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Genesis’ traditional competitors, Yackanich said, are the big ad networks, which are also trying to monetize as much video as they can. The most direct competitor, he said, is video advertising platform Teads.tv.

“Teads is focused on ad formats,” he noted, but is helping in setting up “an ecosystem” for this kind of data-driven, attention-oriented placement.

On the video clip side, he pointed to content recommendation service Taboola and content discovery platform Outbrain, although Yackanich noted that they help to circulate “traffic away from the publisher,” while Genesis is oriented exclusively on reusing the publisher’s existing video content.

“We are the only ones we know of,” he said, “focused on using this kind of proprietary data analysis to understand attention and use that to serve either video ads or video content.”