Archive for August, 2012
Time to pay homage to another “skipping” pioneer. In this episode, we’d like to congratulate Josephine Cochrane, the inventor of what would become the modern day dishwasher. Cochrane was the granddaughter of John Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat, so it would seem the capacity to create was in her blood.
Legend has it that she came up with the invention because her servants were always chipping her fine china. She is said to have exclaimed, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself!”
"Let's see if they can chip my fine china now!"
Cochrane first unveiled her “Cochrane Dishwasher” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and won the highest prize for “best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work.”
Some might call her response overkill, but here at SkipIt, we simply call it awesome.
Last week our team had the pleasure of presenting at the New Tech Denver Meetup alongside several other local startup tech companies. The New Tech Denver and Boulder meetups always draw a crowd, and this one had more than 100 techies in attendance to hear the “what’s what” from emerging technologies along the Front Range.
The SkipIt team donned our comfy SkipIt t-shirts and mingled, sipped our share of beer and then settled in to listen and learn. When it was our turn, the talented Mr. Kevin Hunt (@showtunes), joined by one of our lead engineers, Andrew Kuttig, had 5 minutes to tell the crowd all about the benefits of skipping video ads to get to their online content, how users can pay to skip or earn lots of free skips, about all the main technologies behind running SkipIt and how we’ve signed up tens of thousands of users since we launched in April 2012.
Couldn’t make it that night? If not, check out the video:
Thanks very much to our MapQuest hosts for the use of their cool office space, and to New Tech for allowing us to present with fellow startups like Flowth, Reflections, and Ibotta and listen to an informative Q&A session with Peter Adams from Rockies Venture Club.
We might love to skip video ads, but we won’t skip New Tech meet ups – see you all there.
If only I had SkipIt
The busier we get, the harder it can be to clear away the clutter in our lives. Clearing clutter can extend to our online experience too. And wouldn’t you know it, that some of our favorite websites would like to clear away some of the advertising that clutters their sites too. But the fact is that advertising, pays the bills. So websites have to balance between advertising to stay in business and annoying their visitors with video ad overload.
So how does SkipIt help them clear the clutter while earning even more money than they could before?
SkipIt pays publishers NOT to play an ad. And we recognize that by offering SkipIt, all of a publisher’s web video ads are skippable. Consequently, SkipIt must pay publishers much higher revenue for allowing skipping than they would make actually playing the web video ads. All a publisher has to do is integrate the SkipIt operating system with the their website and they can offer their visitors the ability to skip web video ads on their site.
But what about the advertiser?
Publishers then turn around and credit any advertiser that had an ad skipped. This all happens in an instant. Ah, technology! This credit makes advertisers happy because they’re not paying for skipped ads, and publishers like the extra money and happy advertisers. Most of all, consumers have the choice of whether they want to skip or watch the video ad, and they have total control of their online experience and their schedule. Skipping an ad is free by earning free skips at www.skipit.com or by paying a small fee.
SkipIt — clearing clutter online, one website at a time.
In the world of frequent spam, people often wonder what we do with personally identifiable information like email addresses or names. As part of the SkipIt Pledge, we respect customer privacy, and we work hard to make sure that our customers don’t have to be concerned about their security.
While it is true that SkipIt provides reporting to both advertisers and partner websites on what kinds of people are skipping and choosing to watch their ads, we only provide them with aggregate demographic information like age, gender, region, and ethnicity – just enough information to help advertisers do a better job of targeting relevant ads that you might be interested in. They will never have access to your contact information and will never specifically reach out to you directly just because you signed up for SkipIt.
In fact, your information is so safe that SkipIt’s parent company, SpotXchange, was ranked 2nd out of of 150 companies this year for brand safety among rich media and video ad networks and exchanges!
And now that your mind is at ease, just go ahead and Skipit!
In a recent post we discussed ways to skip online video ads and why SkipIt is fair for everyone – consumers, publishers and advertisers. Now we want to compare how SkipIt stacks up to another ad skipping technology called TrueView.
You might have heard of YouTube. You might, in fact, watch tons of videos on YouTube. If so, you have probably skipped a video ad on YouTube courtesy of their service TrueView. Here’s the difference between theirs and ours:
TrueView – a product that is available on YouTube only
- What’s not to love about ad skipping? We get that. But we also know that ad skipping can hurt websites that are just trying to make money from the content they offer for free to the viewer. You Tube can afford to offer free ad skipping because YouTube has more than 4 billion video streams per day! YouTube can afford to experiment with their 4 billion a day video streams — it’s not a big revenue risk if they offer ad skipping and lose that small percentage of revenue. Most publishers don’t even come close to that volume of video streams. Since most websites are not YouTube, they need to make money from every visitor.
- On YouTube with TrueView, ad skipping comes at no cost to consumer, which encourages the habit of always skipping for free. But free in this case means getting “something for nothing.” When TrueView was first rolled out, only 30% of viewers were skipping ads. Now people are skipping 70% of the time, but without regard for how the “free” part of that equation negatively impacts their favorite publishers. Over the years, advertising has paid the bills for radio, TV and now online content – and some consumers are willing to bear the costs to skip (satellite radio, DVRs, premium subscriptions, etc).
- TrueView claims that its ad skipping solution should help promote more creative video ads. But will laundry detergent EVER be interesting?
How SkipIt is different than TrueView
- SkipIt is fair to publishers! Most publishers don’t have billions of video streams, so they must maximize value of each and every video ad opportunity. SkipIt pays publishers MORE than what they would have been paid had they played the video ad for you. They love it because it keeps their websites clutter-free and creates a better user experience. They’re rewarded for that.
- SkipIt does cost a small fee to the consumer, but that fee helps pay publishers to keep their websites clutter-free, and advertisers don’t have to pay for skipped ads. More importantly, there are ways to earn free skips at SkipIt.com, so for those who want to pay to get to the front of the line – they can pay for SkipIt. Others might want to earn free skips to keep skipping, and SkipIt offers that too.
- SkipIt isn’t limited to one website. Soon SkipIt will be everywhere beyond YouTube, and we want to ensure you can skip there too.
We are glad that ad skipping is becoming more mainstream. But we also love our free content online and know that it’s not free. SkipIt helps give consumers the choice of when they want to skip, where they want to skip. And is fair to everyone to boot.
SkipIt is dedicated to providing online consumers the wants and needs they deserve – letting you skip pre-roll video ads, making your life easier and saving you a lot of time.
In our third episode of “SkipIt Pioneers”, we would like to give thanks to Samuel Morse, who is a valuable Skipping Pioneer. The Yale College student started out as an avid painter and created some impressive artworks but underwent life changes. We’d like to think it was for the better.
After his painting career he would go on and be credited with inventing one of the most important inventions in our history: the telegraph and the Morse code. The Morse code would become the primary language of telegraphy in the world and is still the standard for rhythmic transmission of data.
How did his invention come about? After receiving a letter from a horse messenger that his “wife was convalescent”, Morse immediately left his home to go visit her. But by the time he arrived, she had already been buried. He grew tired of having to wait for important letters that could have been communicated immediately, making life easier and saving a lot of time.
At SkipIt, we’ve taken a page out of Morse’s book. We’ve invented our own technology to make your life easier, stress free and save you time. We made SkipIt, the modern day version of the telegraph, where you can skip pre-roll video ads while you view online videos – saving you the hassle of taking the time to wait for ads to be delivered.
Even though almost a century has passed since the telegraph and the Morse code were brought to our attention, we are still inventing technologies that will make our lives a lot easier and stress free, something Morse pioneered.
Hats off to Samuel Morse for being a Skipping Pioneer. Enjoy SkipIt and skip on!