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: Kamla Bhatt

is a researcher and a technology trend watcher. She is also the host of a popular Internet radio show: http://kamlabhatt-show.com

Consider this. According to Comscore, an Internet research marketing company, in April 2008 about 11 billion videos were consumed in the USA and out of that about 38% was from Google properties. Contrast this number to the one from June 2008 when about 94 million videos were consumed in the USA. People love watching videos. The story is almost similar in the UK. According to UK’s Guardian about 3.5 billion video clips were consumed in March 2008 and 50% of it was from YouTube. It gets a bit complicated when you consider India because of the complex way in which people use the Internet and then there is the cybercafé aspect.

YouTube in many ways made it simple for users to upload their video clips. While YouTube has been wildly successful, it is still struggling to monetise and come up with a viable revenue model. Now, if there is content there has got to be ways to monetise it via advertising and the fact that YouTube is still struggling with its strategy has not deterred venture capitalists and investors from pouring in money into video ad networks either in the US, India or other countries.

Recently there were two significant investments in the video ad network space in India. The first is Helion Venture Partners and Opus Capital invested $10.7 million in Jivox, a Silicon Valley startup with operations in India. The second is IDG Ventures India’s investment of an undisclosed sum of money into Ozone Media, which is a video ad network startup. Here in the US there are a whole bunch of companies that have received significant amounts of money from investors. They include BrightRoll, YuMe, Tremor, Meevio and others.

What intrigued me was the recent flurry of investments in the video ad network space in India and I turned to Diaz Nesamoney who heads Jivox. I met with him in his Silicon Valley office to find out about his startup and how different they are compared to other video ad network companies.