Tubemogul wants to use the new infusion of money to accelerate its hiring and open up additional international offices. “New offices will be in Austin, Sao Paolo, Berlin and Tokyo,” the company’s communications director David Burch told me via email, adding: “We plan to significantly grow existing offices in Sydney — our biggest satellite — London, Toronto, Singapore, Kiev and throughout the US (New York, Chicago, L.A.).” With this round, Tubemogul has raised a total of $35 million.

Readers who’ve been following the online video space for some time may still remember Tubemogul as a company that used to provide syndication and analytics for online video makers. Tubemogul sold that part of the business in January, and has been exclusively concentrating on video advertising ever since. That change of focus seems to be working for the company: Tubemogul served 1,125,866,000 video ads in November, according to comScore. The company hired 57 new employees in the past six months, bringing the total headcount to 132.

The most recent infusion of cash tells us two things: First of all, hiring talent in the Bay Area is getting more and more expensive. And secondly, online advertising is ramping up, with a lot more growth potential ahead. Tubemogul and its investors are betting that a significant portion of that money is going to be spent via so-called real-time-bidding on ad slots. And analysts seem to agree: A recent Forrester study, which was commissioned by one of Tubemogul’s competitors, estimated that real-time bidding for video ads will reach $667 million in 2013.

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By aggregating anonymous user data from multiple third-party sources, TubeMogul is now giving its clients free demographic information about the people who are viewing their ads, with metrics such as age, gender, household income, marital status home ownership and number of children. The data sits alongside other viewership data that TubeMogul makes available, including viewer engagement metrics and geographical information.

For advertisers, the new feature gives them a one-stop destination for gathering information to ensure their ads are being seen by the correct target audience. Previously they relied on demographic data from one or more third-party vendors to validate online campaign effectiveness. But since TubeMogul is taking data from multiple partners and aggregating it, the startup says it has a wider sample base of information to choose from, increasing reliability of the data while also being able to spot and correct errors or inconsistencies in individual data sets.

The ad network world is becoming more and more crowded, as multiple firms seek to serve ads for the rapidly expanding online video market. Most compete on pure reach, but with little to distinguish between them, some are adding technology and features as a value-add to advertisers. The addition of demographic data is a natural next step for TubeMogul, which started out primarily as an analytics firm for publishers but has increasingly focused on providing video ad distribution services. The key advantage to its ad network is the detailed analytics data that it provides advertising clients, and demographic data only ads to that.

TubeMogul has grown pretty rapidly since launching its PlayTime ad serving platform a little over a year ago. The company recently snagged $10 million in a funding round led by Foundation Capital, which it is using to expand its workforce, especially in international markets. TubeMogul now has about 50 employees, and is looking to add another 10 over the coming weeks.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user Angelo DeSantis.

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What comes to mind when you think of newspapers? Whatever it is, it’s probably not streaming video. Yet one of the interesting facts in a new survey of the online video market (PDF link) from video-hosting platform Brightcove and analytics provider TubeMogul is that newspapers overtook broadcasters in terms of the total number of video minutes streamed in the third quarter of 2010. As news publishers of all kinds try to move their operations online, more and more seem to be getting the message that the future includes video.

The Brightcove and TubeMogul report shows that the number of video titles uploaded by newspapers climbed by more than 50 percent in the quarter to almost half a million, and that was more than double the number of videos that newspaper sites uploaded in the same quarter of 2009. The total number of minutes streamed rose to 313 million in the most recent quarter, the report says, compared with 290 million for broadcasters. As Brightcove and TubeMogul note in the study, their figures are not necessarily representative of the entire video market, but the data is still interesting.

Some of the growth in video streaming was likely a result of the major news events during the third quarter, including the World Cup soccer tournament and the mid-term elections in the U.S., but that doesn’t explain why newspapers outpaced broadcasters in terms of videos (although it’s possible some broadcasters no longer use Brightcove or TubeMogul and therefore aren’t reflected in the data). In addition to leading in total minutes streamed, newspapers also took the lead in terms of the total number of videos, with close to 500,000 uploaded — more than twice as many as the broadcasting group.

The one area in which broadcasters led the pack, however, is the average number of minutes watched, where broadcasters as a group were far ahead of newspapers. This suggests that while newspapers are uploading more video, readers (or viewers) aren’t finding that content as engaging as they do videos that come from broadcasters. That’s probably not surprising, considering many newspapers are still grappling with how to produce video, something that doesn’t come naturally to print publications, while most broadcasters have learned how to create video content that grabs viewers.

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Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Jim Kelly

TubeMogul intends to invest the money in building out its PlayTime ad platform, which has proven to be very successful since its launch in March. The company reached more than 800 million views of its ads in September, placing it second in the comsCore Media Metrix ranking of potential reach for ad networks in August. TubeMogul also said today that has so far run more than 200 campaigns for major brand advertisers.

In addition, the company wants to expand its international presence and potentially open an office in London. TubeMogul’s communications director David Burch told me during a phone conversation today that international markets have responded very well to PlayTime. TubeMogul just secured a deal with the Times of India to power its online advertising, and it has run some 20 campaigns in the Asia-Pacific region so far.

PlayTime has become TubeMogul’s biggest revenue generator in a matter of months, but the startup made a name for itself with its InPlay self-serve analytics platform, which provides detailed statistics to online video publishers. TubeMogul also wants to invest some of the funding into expanding InPlay, and Burch told me that the two products go hand-in-hand. “Our advertising product is very analytics-focused,” he said, adding: “The more we learn, the better we are at both.”

The funding also comes with an addition to TubeMogul’s board of directors, where Foundation Capital Venture Partner Ashu Garg will join Ajay Chopra from Trinity Ventures, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and NetRatings founder David Toth.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Refracted Moments™.

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Lawyers to continue piracy fight; a London law firm has pledged to continue to target file sharers, despite controversy surrounding the acquisition and care of users’ data. (BBC News)

Now Available: Update v1.2 for Hulu Plus on iOS; new version of Hulu Plus app improves playback of videos at high bit rates, amongst other things. (Hulu Blog)

comScore Releases August 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings; Facebook.com secures second place in online video content ranking with 59 million viewers. (Press Release)

Brightcove and TubeMogul Expand Distribution Opportunities for Media Publishers; Brightcove now offers seamless integration with TubeMogul’s OneLoad video distribution capability. (Brightcove Blog)

PlayOn finally gets its iPhone app approved, HTML5 lets out a sigh of resignation; app makes it possible to stream Netflix / Amazon / Hulu / ESPN / CBS  and other web video content straight to the iPhone. (Engadget)

TubeMogul, which is perhaps best known for its reporting and analytics product, rolled out its PlayTime ad network just a few months ago, but has already run more than 180 brand campaigns and received more than 800 million views for those ads. In short time, it became the largest revenue generator for the startup, topping sales from TubeMogul’s reporting and analytics business not long after launch.

PlayTime is designed to provide more transparency and accountability to serving video ads online; relying in part on TubeMogul’s reporting features, the product can tell advertisers which pages a video ad ran on, but can also tell them whether an ad is click-to-play or auto-play and long it ran before a viewer clicked away.

The network can also target ads to the viewers most likely to watch them, which helps drive viewership and engagement up. That’s garnered interest from advertisers — which include brands like 20th Century Fox, TRESemme , Dannond and Olay — and publishers, many of which already use TubeMogul for its reporting and video distribution products.

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Viewers watched more videos from broadcasters than any other media vertical for the ninth consecutive quarter, according to the research report. Those broadcasters served up 406 million video streams online in the second quarter, which was a 25 percent increase year-over-year.

The research also pointed to an interesting distinction between the amount of video that was viewed on broadcast sites versus through embedded players. Viewers spent 50 percent more time watching videos on broadcast sites (3:00 minutes) as they watched through off-site embedded video players (1:59). Although most broadcasters make embedded players available for full-length and short-form video content, many have done a good job of driving viewers to their own sites, as they had the smallest percentage of content viewed through embedded players among the verticals Brightcove and TubeMogul looked at.

The longer viewers spend watching videos, the more likely they are to see mid-roll and display ads against the videos. Broadcasters are also better able to monetize videos that run on their own sites as opposed to those that are embedded, because in many cases advertisers are more comfortable placing ads against videos that run on-site than those that are embedded.

In addition to keeping video viewers on-site, broadcasters would also do well to help viewers find content through social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. According to the report, those social networks delivered the most engaged viewing audiences, followed by search engines Bing, Yahoo and Google. Again, broadcasters have done a good job in trying to grow their audience through social sharing, as most broadcast video players have sharing options built in.

Many broadcast networks are beginning to experiment with social sharing through social TV apps like Miso, Philo and Tunerfish, which entice users to “check in” to their favorite programs and share their viewing habits with friends. CBS is even rolling out its own social TV app, called TV.com Relay, which it plans to promote through on-air programming.

While many viewers tune in to videos on broadcaster sites to catch up on episodes they might have missed, connections through social networks can help create new fans for shows online. In addition to creating a more engaged audience for the online programming, it also improves marketing for the shows during their TV broadcasts.

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Publishers need only insert TubeMogul’s free InPlay plugin into their HTML5 video players to get viewership data across their web, mobile web and mobile app video implementations. Once done, their stats will be integrated with reporting from their existing Flash players, giving them the ability to see average viewing time and completion rates, audience geography, video player embeds and domain and site referrals across all platforms that their videos were shown on.

Despite the vast popularity of the iPad, iPhone and other Apple products that don’t allow Flash video, many publishers have held off on rolling out support for HTML5 video. One reason for that hesitation is the general lack of mature reporting and analytics products for those devices. That is quickly changing, however, as companies like TubeMogul see an opportunity to fill a need for video measurement for HTML5 players.

TubeMogul isn’t the only provider that is tackling the problem of HTML5 reporting. Video search and advertising startup MeFeedia has also announced an analytics suite for HTML5 video, and Brightcove says advanced reporting and analytics are on its roadmap for HTML5 video management services.

While TubeMogul is primarily known for its free reporting and analytics offerings, the company has also expanded its business to support video distribution and advertising. Its Destinations product, announced earlier this year, enables publishers to freely distribute their videos to a number of pre-set syndication platforms, or to create custom profiles for their own distribution partners and platforms. It also recently launched an ad platform, which has quickly surpassed its other business in sales.

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(That’s right; this post is a response to the Fine Brothers’ response to MSNBC’s response to Business Insider. It’s like Inception, except with less Ellen Page.)

Taking this one step at a time: that Business Insider article, written by William Wei? Don’t put too much stock in it. When the article first came out, none of those included on the list were willing to speak on the record as to whether or not Wei and TubeMogul’s assumptions regarding YouTube CPMs were accurate, since it violates the YouTube partner agreement to publicly give specifics on their income.

However, last week, Greg Benson of Mediocre Films (ranked as number seven on the Business Insider list, and estimated to be making $116,000 a year) said that Wei was incorrect about him receiving 159 million views over the last 12 months.

“My official total video views since I joined YouTube in 2006 is 113 million — spread over FOUR YEARS,” Benson writes, adding that “their CPM estimates are actually totally wrong. Although it’s kind of fun to be on a list I don’t belong on, it’s more important to me that people get their facts straight before spewing garbage to the public.”

TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson, with whom I spoke via phone, confirmed that the error regarding Benson’s views is real, an outright mistake made on their end while transferring data from TubeMogul to Business Insider. To compensate for this error, TubeMogul is prepared to offer Benson space on their ad network to “help make up the difference.”

After double-checking the data, Wilson added that TubeMogul stood by the rest of their results. Business Insider has been informed of the error; if it decides to update the article, then the next-highest-ranked YouTuber following current number 10 Community Channel would be Russian philologist Hot for Words, just beating out vlogger iJustine.

In reaction to all this, you have Helen A.S. Popkin’s response to the list on MSNBC.com, which comes off as deliberately antagonistic and glib. I say this as someone who agrees with Popkin that Annoying Orange isn’t great content, but still has a lot of respect for the way that show and the other YouTubers featured have built up an audience.

Because that’s the thing: To dismiss something because it’s popular, in the sprawling digital marketplace, is to be willfully ignorant of an emerging skill set within the new media world: the ability to get seen. It’s a complicated formula that involves the constant creation of new content, regular communication with one’s audience, endless networking and collaboration with other creators and lightning-fast response to popular topics. It’s all about connection.

That skill set is so fundamental to shaping what gets attention and what doesn’t that, yes, it can mean the quality of what’s being spread becomes almost irrelevant, leading to bad videos and, ultimately, articles like Popkin’s.

The Fine Brothers characterize Popkin’s reaction as “petty jealousy when it comes to the digital studios and ‘professional web series’ community.” This isn’t the most constructive attitude, but they go on to make the reasonable point that the creators being panned are working hard to create a viable market for web video: one that will benefit all web content down the line.

Within that marketplace, the content itself is improving. Take as a recent example Tony E. Valenzuela’s solid Black Box TV, which combines known YouTube talent with strong production values and social media savvy, resulting in nearly 600,000 views so far for the first two episodes combined.

It’s unlikely that Black Box TV would have achieved that level of views without its YouTube-famous cast, but if it featured professional actors instead (which, some have argued, would be an improvement), the show would still have a strong social media campaign of rich behind-the-scenes content, an iPhone app, and an active blog, all contributing to direct engagement with its audience.

The not-good stuff needs to get better. The good stuff needs to get seen. None of this happens in a vacuum; it happens in a collaborative and engaging environment. While ignoring the success of YouTubers is unproductive, mocking it is even worse.

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