I am a big believer in the way that Craiglist built their business. They started with a free community that was built on a cornerstone of integrity, simplicity, fun and "job" centricity (find an apartment, be in the know about local parties, post an employment opening, buy/sell stuff). When they started charging for portions of the service, they didn't break the user experience, nickle/dime their user base or violate the covenants that made users loyal Craigslisters in the first place.
vSocial is trying to emulate that approach, and today we announced a sneak preview of a product that we believe extends the vSocial value proposition without breaking the experience our users have come to expect: AdPlayer.
What is AdPlayer™? It is a video ad service that makes it very easy to create branded, interactive video ads from uploaded video content. Our belief is that prosumers and small-to-medium sized businesses will "hire" AdPlayer for the "job" of creating actionable video ads, testimonials, how-tos and the like for deployment on sites they operate, advertise on, and/or distribute through ad networks, blogs, discussion groups, etc.
The benefit of AdPlayer is that while you are responsible for uploading the video content, all of the back end encoding, descriptions/tagging and hosting is served through the vSocial network. In addition, you can augment the content with your logo, watermarks, a call to action tagline, and buttons that can be used to call up specific content, take users to your web site, and enable the ad to be forwarded on via email or embedded by interested parties into their web site or blog.
Pricing on AdPlayer begins at $30/year, and tiers based on whether the usage is for commercial or non-commercial operators, the number of video streams needing to be supported and whether the ads are limited to an individual web site, multiple sites or designed to be virally distributed.
In other words, this is a service aimed at democratizing the internet video ad space in the same way that Google's AdWord service did with search ads since the service is cheap, carries your branding, your call to action, is completely self-service and no technical knowledge is required.
To celebrate the sneak preview, we have created a video wall of Superbowl XL Ads, and are running a contest through the end of the week, with the winner receiving a Video iPod. I would love your thoughts and feedback on AdPlayer, as we are committed to delivering a great offering. If you are interested in the beta, let me know.
vSocial's basic service, which has grown to 250K unique visitors a day, almost 1M videos served a day and over 60M monthly page views, remains free, and hopefully always will.
