Choosing the model - Serving audience AND marketer's problem

In the content business, you solve a problem by providing appropriate content. The marketer underwrites your effort, because the relationship formed gives them access to and/or comfort with an audience.

With video you can do in-page, pre-roll and transitional. Brightcove has bet it all on pre-roll, and is losing by it. Clearly the market isn't being served, so content isn't coming to it, no matter how it favors the marketer

What gives?

A CMP publisher told me the way he viewed web video was you let your major customer put up whatever they wanted, and after a while, you charged for it. And thats exactly what they did.

Needless to say, as his print publication's ad revenues have been dying, circulation falling to nothing with a page count smaller than a advertising circular, is it any wonder that his web video effort is similarly clueless?

Its a case of "chicken and egg" - which comes first, the content or the ad? Clearly Mr. CMP thinks its ad then content. Similarly, pre-roll presumes that a viewer will endure the ad sponsorship before viewing the content.

But what if the viewer doesn't have his problem solved by the content? Could we be risking both the resentment of the ad AND the content, by being forced to watch an ad, and forced to experience the content, getting nothing for the time? Might this even kill interest in the site?

This has nothing to do with quality of ad or content, but with maintaining viewers expectations. For that, one builds the primary relationship that makes the secondary one worthwhile - enough to advertise on.