I like this whole concept that Joe and Juan are doing. I think its about time that an advertiser get a chance to find the kinds of creative videos he wants to associate their brand with.

More here: http://www.storybids.com/press.html

Storybids Launches Product Placement Auction House for Brand Integrations Into Online Video

Now seeking independent filmmakers and brand advertisers looking for partnerships.

Given the Storybids teams strong background in Internet advertising and social media marketing, we are uniquely poised to capture strong market share in this relatively new yet burgeoning business model. We look forward to serving both video creators and brand advertisers with a unique video advertising opportunity.

Irvine, CA (PRWEB) May 5, 2008 – Storybids, Inc. today announced the launch of their product placement marketplace where online video content creators can get paid to feature physical products in pre-production user-generated videos, serial mini-dramas, videoblogs and webisodes. Advertisers may use Storybids searching capabilities to seek out video creators that meet their demographic criterion such as viewership, subscriptions, and ratings or by genre or age demographic. Video creators looking to fund their independent or professional film projects may now seek out product placement advertising opportunities by targeting specific advertisers that complement the storyline of future content. Storybids also works as a social media marketplace for filmmakers by allowing them to connect with other filmmakers for advice and collaboration on film projects.

Over two years in the making, Founders Joseph Morin and Juan Prado spent considerable time conducting research and development for the most compelling brand entertainment and online video advertising business model. The two have created a complementary means of monetizing user generated and professional video. Storybids secured a Series A round of venture capital financing in August, 2007 from STN Labs of Toronto, Canada and soft launched a beta marketplace in February of 2008. Based on a storyboarding concept where video creators would upload storyboard samples of potential scenes to feature product placement, the website features the capability to accept any form of digital media such as a storyboard, images or video as an example for advertisers to peruse for brand placement opportunities.

A recent research study by Mindshare shows that viewers react negatively to interruptive TV style ads and attempt to skip them whenever possible suggesting that consumers are far more receptive to product placement in online video programming than pre- and post-roll advertising. PQ Media released a study in February, 2007 that showed spending on branded entertainment marketing grew 14.7% to an all time high of $22.3 billion in 2007 and is projected to increase by another 13.9% in 2008 to $25.41 billion driven by product placement, event sponsorship/marketing, and advergaming/webisodes.

Benefits to the Storybids product placement marketplace include a robust transaction processing engine where video creators may upload media available for in-video advertising inventory that is completely searchable by advertisers and visa-versa where media sellers may search for specific advertisers complementary to their own video brand. Storybids also offers distribution and video analytics measurement by optimizing finalized video for search engines and submitting to several video hosting sites such as YouTube, MySpaceTV, Veoh, AOL Video, Metacafe, DailyMotion and others simultaneously allowing dashboard reporting on the videos performance via views, comments and ratings aggregated across the various video sites.

Early in the companys lifecycle the Storybids team had some success in promoting a bloggers attempt to secure a commercial during Superbowl XLI and created a media frenzy with the MySuperProposal project, the end result being a wedding proposal acceptance viral video that was seen over 6 million times worldwide. CEO Joseph Morin stated, “Given the Storybids teams strong background in Internet advertising and social media marketing, we are uniquely poised to capture strong market share in this relatively new yet burgeoning business model. We look forward to serving both video creators and brand advertisers with a unique video advertising opportunity.” For more information on Storybids unique advertising model please visit the Storybids site.

About Storybids
Storybids, Inc. is a venture capital funded start up based in Irvine, CA focusing on in-video advertisement via product placement in user generated content as well as professionally scripted webisodes. Storybids offers a new way to monetize video by inserting actual product, services or verbal mentions pre-production before a video goes viral. The videos uploaded via content creators may be uploaded to multiple video hosting sites at once and then tracked via analytics for performance via their dashboard. Advertisers may select video content creators in the marketplace via a search tool that tracks views, comments and ratings across multiple video hosting sites. Online at www.storybids.com.

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So I was blogtagged by incrediBill and JHud and here is my list.

1. I like to treasure hunt and metal detect. I once went to a fantasy mining camp, as Rob Black called it, where I worked my tail off for a week for 1/8 ounce of gold. I even have a service for this at: Professional Treasure Recovery Solutions

2. I love golf and disc golf, I’ve been playing at a new local course, Summit IL Disc Golf as much as possible!

3. I have an addiction to learning and especially LOVE James Burke. He is the one person I’d pay $,$$$ to meet. He’s this old british dude who has a series called Connections that rocks!

4. I can’t get enough of the grateful dead, I love listening to entire shows while I work. Also I’m super excited to see DSO next month!

5. I play table tennis (some of you know it as ping pong) a lot. I got hooked on it while enduring the cold Chicago winters and am active in a club. So if your ever looking to ‘pong’ it, I’m down…bring it!

So I pass along the tagging to: cshel, kris , Michael Tchong, the extreme scene, education monsoon

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I understand the frustration webmasters go through trying to get that next link, but it’s actually pretty easy to get the ball rolling.

Many enquire, beg and cheat to gain some kind of incredible link advantage, when the stress and effort isn’t necessary. My methods and knowledge of ‘where’ to do this isn’t science or secrets, it’s simply knowing where the cheapest and best targeted places to advertise are.

Make sure the links are 100% targeted - most important,as you don’t want your visitors seeking out untargeted goods or services. They won’t return if you mess them about.

Let’s imagine Site A sells carpet cleaner. You now need buyers that want carpet cleaning stuff, so the obvious sites for advertising on will be Janitorial or have a strong cleaning theme to them.

All good links aren’t free. Yes, I know people chase freebies, but it’s so much work and hassle that a few paid links can work wonders in the long term, it’s well worth actually ‘paying’ (yes it’s a filthy word) to get going.

So basically you want a cheap paid service that submits you to all the major search engines (about 300 should be fine). Next choose Mirago as it’s a good link and costs only £14 + VAT for 12 months. You also want to go with Microsoft Small Business Directory at £20 or abouts for 1 year. JoeAnt at $40, Gimpsey is free. Next, seek out any decent b2b and niche directories and buy a link in every one (ensure the directory is established though, and has been on the web for at least 12 months). Okay - that’ll get you off to a flying start, and once you finish submitting, you should have about 100 quality links. Quality speaks volumes on the web and is what you should be going after.

Next buy a sposored ad with Yahoo for £25 a month, and create an Adwords campaign for a few pound a month. These are cheap methods that house links on quality sites. Remember the reasons for the links - you are doing this so each link gets picked up - these cheap methods won’t deliver billions of visitors to websites - you ARE NOT doing this for that reason. The aim is for spidering and link swap power over time.

The Golden rule is to save you many hours of negative and naff link swapping - and by buying cheap links, it works a treat. These links will get picked up by webmasters, content seekers, businesses and the not so good websites - but you need to remember that for every one of your links that is placed, another 50 sites will link to you, which I believe is called ‘link surge’. As you surf you’ll find useful sites - so make a note on paper, and not bookmarks as they can be accidently deleted - and keep all this info in a A4 lever arch file (you’ll need this later). Next get those hard backed directories, and start extracting email addresses, save them to disk and file for later use. Send out a nice email letter asking for a link, and keep going down the list until you finish. At the end, you should have quite a few targeted links, which will also get picked up.

Note: under no circumstances should you send 10 million follow up emails to each website. All this will do is wind up the site owners or get you banned by your ISP, and if that happens you won’t be able to turn those link swaps into clients as they’ll be watching you for the emails. Never Spam anybody - be nice!

Invent a free service and offer that as part of a link swap - I’ve done this many times and it works well. In fact 9 times out of 10 it will work. After about 3 months hard work, you’ll start to see good results in Google.

Buy large adverts in Major search engines twice per year and get a Yellow Pages enhanced listing too. When buying ads, it’s cheaper to get the Paid For Inclusion options and it prevents click fraud - let em click away…….

Avoid the following when advertising:

Forums

Blogs

Bad neighbourhoods

Link exchanges

—– believe me these really eat into your time, and will only produce minimal results, as will contributing for forums. You want to take fast action and get the best results, and that involves paying cold hard cash. Sorry, but there aren’t any secrets I’m afraid. Free is mostly crap - money talks and bull walks!

Buy links, buy cheap and buy often……… I got well over 43′000 backlinks in Google doing the above, and I only spent £200!

www.eventdomain.co.uk

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Yeah its hard to find…a search engine without ads. The contextual advertising model is way too easy to take advantage of with all the PPC ways to monetize the search traffic.

But here are some that we’ve found:

myway.com - yeah their search kind of sucks but the tabs they give are cool and there are still sponsored link ads, the like of Google Adsense and the OV feed.

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Here we have the latest info on being a webmaster coming to you from me, Phil Maher. I also go by maherphil or nipperkin in some circles as well. feel free to contact me anytime at phil at philmaher.com

The focus of this site is to give webmasters REAL INFORMATION on the various aspects of webmastering. This site is a community site and encourages its users to post comments, questions and full articles on the art of the webmaster.

The site is really MADE FOR YOU, because with a strong community we can all enjoy the synergy of collective knowledge.

We will cover these sections, posting questions and answers:

Web Design: What is the best design techniques to get what your looking for? How do I design a webpage? What are the best tools to use, etc…

Web Development: Do I have to know about programming to make a dtabase driven site? What is the best IDE for web dev.

Affiliate Networks: What affiliate network will pay me the most per action and on time? How can I get a hold of them and what areas do you excel in?

Link Exchanges: How can I get sites to link to me? What tools can I use to make the link discovery and correspondance part easier?

Search Engine Marketing /Optimization: What is this and how can I keep up?

Various other sub categories can be spawned off of these starter. We hope to grow this site very big and look forward to your participation to get in on the ground level.

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