Brightcove Ad Monetization: One Year After Launch

Brightcove’s customers have more opportunities than ever to monetize their content. They can sell subscriptions and rentals, offer influencer campaigns and sponsorships, or generate revenue through video advertising. But tapping into the $191B video ad opportunity has become increasingly complicated for many of our customers. As we analyzed the billions of video views we manage every month, we found suboptimal data configurations, unfilled ad avails, and CPMs we believe should be better. Between the ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, clean rooms, header-bidding configurations, and a myriad of other ad tech partnerships, it’s easy to see how the entropy crept in.

It’s against this backdrop that we launched Brightcove Ad Monetization. This service is an end-to-end AVOD solution for media companies to stay competitive, earn more money, and grow their businesses. With over 60 signups in its first year, we are continuing to grow our customers and offerings to maximize the opportunities that video advertising holds.

What to Expect from Brightcove Ad Monetization

Our Ad Monetization service is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to offer your inventory to advertisers.

Brightcove Media Studio customers have the option to receive full white-glove service from the start, with an onboarding experience designed to maximize the monetization experience. While the technology that fuels the video ad service can be complex, we’ll handle the advanced setup, integrations with the direct ad servers, and configuration for filling remnant inventory.

Once you’re live on the platform, our in-house industry experts will help you make the best decisions to grow your business. That includes working to fill ad spots or digging into your data to maximize your CPMs.

Perhaps best of all, the nature of Brightcove’s customer base creates a superior platform for monetization to help you truly maximize your earnings. Our robust network of brand-safe clients with their high quality content is aggregated into one ecosystem, providing more opportunities for ad placement and attracting premium advertisers. In other words, Brightcove offers much more than traditional ad marketplaces.

How Brightcove Ad Monetization Has Grown

We’ve learned a lot about what our customers expect from us, both as a streaming provider and an advertising partner. The first year of our service attests to the investments we’ve made in helping our customers drive revenue through video ads and grow their businesses.

Ad Marketplaces and Ad Servers

We launched our service early in 2023, leveraging Magnite as our first demand partner and Springserve as our first ad server. These partnerships allowed us to manage fullstack and fallback inventory for our customers to further their ad strategy and maximize their ad dollars.

We later partnered with Pubmatic to provide more demand opportunities as well as Google Ad Manager (GAM). With the addition of these ad marketplaces and ad servers, we’re able to more easily integrate with our clients and serve more impressions to larger audiences.

Ad Operations Support

As our Ad Monetization service has grown, we’ve scaled our ad ops team so they can better support our customers. Our solution now includes managed service tiers (Basic, Advanced, and Premium) offering varying levels of setup and hands-on support.

Ad Analytics and Insights

We introduced Ad Insights as a set of analytics to measure ad performance and how it changes over time. It correlates ad frequency, placement, and duration with viewer engagement across players, devices, regions, and more. It also provides visualizations that compare key engagement metrics to advertising intensity. From these, customers can gather insights on playback session length, long-term engagement for returning viewers, and ad quartile drop-off rates.

Learn More About Brightcove Ad Monetization

The Brightcove Ad Monetization service is our first standalone advertising offering, allowing our customers to stay competitive, earn more money, and grow their businesses. As an end-to-end AVOD solution, we are positioned to support our customers’ ad strategies from onboarding to optimization. Contact your account manager to learn more.

This blog was originally written in 2023 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.