Testing LiveRail
As you may have noticed, we’ve switched in these days from YouTube to LiveRail for posting video commercials at AdverBox. This happened since we were invited from Mark Trefgarne, the CEO at LiveRail, to test out the closed beta (it works on invitation for both publishers and advertisers).
In two words LiveRail is is a video distribution and advertising platform, bringing together video publishers and advertisers.
Essentially what they’ve built is a complete web-based platform for publishers to manage their library of video content, monetize it and track earnings, and to allow advertisers to manage targeted, pay-per-click video ad campaigns across the network of publisher’s video content.
Both the publishers’ and advertisers’ interfaces are very easy to use, and allow to upload videos and share them with the folks out there. Nothing new by now, except that for each video there are some small non intrusive teasers that can be clicked to view commercials from advertisers. The commercial model is based on a pay-per-click basis, so there’s a further boost over the opportunities an advertiser can bring from the platform: make the commercial seen (branding) and get traffic to the website (direct response). This is quite new.
Publishers can easily track the earnings for each video, upload, embed, share and so on (the classic features of a video sharing platform). Advertisers can choose ove more targeting features for each publishing website. Done the match, you can link targeted video ads to your own videos.
Here’s a screenshot of the Publisher’s account: as you can see each video has its own details, including the earning. In that way you can track what content fits the needs of your readers’ base, and optimize it in order to serve more content and get earnings from that.
The earnings are not real by now (this means we’ve not already earned any cents from the program), but are tracked just to show how the program works.
Also the advertisers’ interface and campaign management is idiotproof, very easy through 3 steps:
To have an overview on how the entire platform works, just visit the LiveRail website.
Like this campaign? Dislike it? Discuss at AdverBox People
Advertising, Interactive | Neuville - 2007-07-15 | Send this ad to a friend |
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Sounds like an interesting product. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch any of the videos. As you probably know, their implementation requires that the viewing web client accept cookies from any old website. That’s a big privacy no-no.
Here’s what I see in my properly configured browser instead of any of the videos:
“The LiveRail player requires third-party cookies to be enabled. If you are having trouble viewing this, please add liverail.com to your list of trusted sites, or adjust you cookie settings within your browser’s options.”
No reason I should have to let them track my browsing just to watch a video, so, no, I won’t be adding them to my whitelist, nor will I be turning down my security settings.
I would urge LiveRail to fail more gracefully (e.g., go ahead and send cookies to clients that allow it, but still allow playback on clients that don’t) or find a less privacy-hostile way of achieving their goals.
Hello Rube,
you’re right, they should allow views also to people with cookies disabled. I feel it’s a “security” issue to avoid false clicks and views from “anonymous” surfers.
Another feature I noticed was missing is a “Share this” cell in the flash; that would be nice to allow people to embed the video and make it working for you…