Yesterday, GoFish Corporation announced the launch of a vertical entertainment and media distribution network that will help marketers reach 17.4 million 6-17 year old online users in the U.S. The kids, teens and tweens market is ripe for advertisers and the GoFish network includes a limited number of high quality sites, from gaming to virtual worlds. Advertisers will be able to use video in different ways across the network, from standard pre-rolls to creative in-game and virtual world placements. Tabreez Verjee, GoFish president, discusses the opportunities in this week’s iChat.
iSPOT: Please provide background on GoFish.
Verjee: It started in late 2003 as a multimedia search company. We launched a video product similar to YouTube with user-generated video. The audience grew but was a distant second to YouTube. The company was leveraging user-generated content and working with established creators to add content that was more advertiser friendly. Last July, we shifted focus to a youth entertainment network, a vertical ad network focused on the 6-17 year old demographic of kids, teens and tweens. We signed up leading publishers that cater to that demo. The youth market has been in desperate need of a company like this and because of that need we’ve been able to grow from start-up to 17.4 million uniques in the U.S. in a six month period.
iSPOT: Does your network include your own site as well as others?
Verjee: Our site is very insignificant from a size perspective. We’ve signed up some very large publishers, such as Miniclip.com, the world’s largest online gaming site that caters to youth. It has good engagement and click through metrics and they’re able to deliver ad solutions that are immersive such as advergaming. They can create custom games around your brand or characters and guarantee 10 million game clicks. On the virtual world side we have cartoondollemporium.com, a dress up site for teen girls. We also have thecookiejarcompany.com, one of the leading kids production companies with multiple TV shows. Cookiejar has the online rights for TV shows they’re launching in virtual worlds.
iSPOT: How will advertisers use video across different content types, such as games and virtual worlds?
Verjee: It’s a tremendous opportunity for video. We’re an entertainment network, we syndicate content across our network and we announced a partnership with Viacom. From an advertising standpoint we can do pre-roll ads before, during or after a game. In virtual worlds there’s a big opportunity, like Gaia, which created a virtual environment for movie studios, where people went into a studio and watched trailers. We’re doing something similar. We can help launch movie properties within a gaming environment or virtual world or community site because we bring access to the content. We can bring it to a significantly larger audience than Gaia across multiple sites.
iSPOT: Whose role is it to develop the video executions on each site?
Verjee: Traditionally, publishers design their sites with certain ad units that can do different things. We’re different from other ad networks because they’re blind networks that are comprised of hundreds of sites. When you work with that many sites it becomes difficult to target your advertising. We have 24 sites, focussed on bigger, higher quality properties, so we can help them redesign their sites to make them more ad friendly and capable. We’re able to help sites that don’t have experience with it but they have a good product and audience. We can bridge the gap with the advertising.
iSPOT: If you want an advertiser to run on a variety of different kinds of sites, how do you help advertisers vary their video for each type of site?
Verjee: Our team comes from Yahoo and was responsible for packages on the Yahoo network. They can figure out exposure in premium areas and pick up different pieces of network. We’re taking that expertise and applying it here to our different sites. We have packages that can help advertisers reach 6-12 year old girls, we know where they are in our network and we can package up certain areas within game or virtual worlds sections to offer them that demographic. If an advertiser doesn’t like games but wants virtual worlds or community sites, we can make it happen. We can offer tranparency that advertisers value.
iSPOT: Is there a revenue share with publishers?
Verjee: It’s pretty standard, the industry norm is around 50 percent.
iSPOT: How does playing video ads for children differ from adults? What kind of standards are there?
Verjee: Our network is 6-17, which represents different age groups. For under 13, COPA (Child Online Protection Act) rules govern this stuff. The rules prevent publishers from collecting personal information. It’s not directly our responsibility, but we educate publishers to be compliant.
iSPOT: How do the rules apply to video ads?
Verjee: You have to let them know it’s an ad which can be done in different ways, usually by denoting it in text.
iSPOT: What kind of advertisers will use the network?
Verjee: The key categories are entertainment, packaged goods, retail and consumer electronics. They’re big categories. We do well in gaming and I’m excited about entertainment, there’s a real opportunity with movie studios. We can catch kids across all the different activities they participate in. When you’re launching a movie, you can get them in mass which you can’t even do with Saturday morning TV. One half hour reaches 600,000-700,000 kids, which is nothing. We can catch them in an immersive manner in virtual sites or other sites and we can get them with a movie character moving on top of a page. That kind of exposure is compelling.
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