And more money for digital advertising. Vidgyor, a Bangalore-based online video advertisement startup which helps broadcasters earn revenues through personalised, targeted video ads, has raised $500K from AngelPrime in a seed funding round.
Founded in 2013 by Parth Desai and Mahaboob Khan, Vidgyor came up to make video commercials on Internet TV, more relevant. Currently, most of the in-video advertisements we see are actually toned down version of a brand’s TV commercials. And even though these ads are same, Internet TV audience is strikingly different from the usual Television audience. Vidgyor hence aims to help brands create Internet TV specific advertisements, through its platform.
To do that, Vidgyor builds personalised video ads for broadcasters of live streaming media. Vidgyor’s intelligent algorithm auto-detects original broadcast TV ads and replaces them with user-targeted, personalized video ads from 3rd party Ad-networks or in-house ad sales.
I had a brief chat with Mahaboob, one of the co-founders, about how this entire concept came up to him, to which he says,
Currently, broadcasters are unable to generate revenue if their channel/show is live-streamed directly via satellites. This is because they are forced to show the same TV commercial on the stream, as is being shown on live television. We aim to help broadcasters increase their revenue generation, by giving them personalised video advertisements for live stream.
To source commercials for its video platform, Vidgyor ties-up with advertising networks (that count is already 8), who are more than happy to tie up with the brand, knowing that their ads will reach a much larger audience through Vidgyor.
In a nutshell, Vidgyor increases advertising inventory for these ad networks and optimizes revenue by aggregating ad-networks. Vidgyor helps ad networks reach a specific, more targeted user base through its platform, to help them deliver relevant ads to a relevant audience.
Mahaboob tells me that the entire platform runs i real-time, embedded at the back-end of the broadcaster’s website via an API.
Once we reach a consensus with the broadcaster, we integrate our platform on their websites via our API. If a broadcaster has a custom player, we embed ours into that player, otherwise we provide them with our own player for displaying video ads.
says Mahaboob
Once integrated, Vidgyor starts delivering real-time ads to the viewers via broadcaster’s player, thus generating greater revenues, even from a live internet stream.
The ads are highly targeted and geo-centric. Every user gets a different advertisements, which are filtered on the basis of their location, product choices and several other factors. Mahaboob explains,
Say for example you are sitting in Delhi and I’m in Bangalore. Advertisers obviously have different advertisements for people in different locations. So our player automatically generates ads, based on numerous factors, location being a primary one.
Talking about his investment into Vidgyor, Bala Parthasarathy, Managing Partner at AngelPrime, said in a prepared statement,
Personalized advertising for live TV over Internet has largely been an untapped market in the country. We are excited to partner with them and support them in their growth.
For revenues, Vidgyor has partnered on a certain commissioned model with both the broadcasters and the advertising network. While they have a one-time arrangement with ad networks, boadcasters work on a revenue basis.
While the platform is itself an innovation in advertising, there are still certain strands in the User experience part which need fine-tuning. And Vidgyor’s strong 12 member team is working towards that. Mahaboob tells me, that they are looking to make a user’s real-time experience as lag free as possible, and also implement AI to detect when a TV commercial might be coming in, so as to pre-cache the live-stream video ad which will act as a replacement.
And since the product can obviously be implemented on a much larger, global scale, Vidgyor does have expansion plans in mind. Mahaboob says,
We are looking to expand to South-East Asia in the next 6 months, since the market conditions are pretty much similar to India’s
