The player: Levy Cohen, founder and CEO of Collarity
The play: Collarity is a Web-based software service that helps publishers fine-tune the placement of video and text content on their Web sites. Collarity does that by providing a real-time dynamic analysis of consumers’ clicking and search behavior on a particular site. If certain videos, text or images are more popular on a site, Collarity reports back to the publisher immediately so the most relevant content and ads can be served to site visitors.
The pitch: Collarity’s special sauce lies in its ability to leverage the user interaction on each Web site. “Communities are dynamic and changing all the time,” Mr. Cohen said. “We know how to leverage all the clicks so we can determine what is most popular in a certain area. When you go to a site and click around, then we let publishers know what happened behind the scenes.” Collarity uses that knowledge to optimize search, video usage and time spent, leading to more ad dollars as a result. “In real-time Collarity provides recommendations and search results that were determined by the implicit behavior of users before, allowing targeted content delivery that will appeal directly to a very defined user,” he said.
In the mix: Mr. Cohen said publishers using Collarity have seen, on average, a 15% to 25% increase in page views after they begin using the service. “The users are looking at more pages because our recommendations are based on behavior of the users,” Mr. Cohen said. Competitors include Baynote and Google’s AdSense.
The backstory: Collarity was founded in 2005 and launched in November 2006. Clients include Fox TV stations, Fox on Demand, Crain’s Chicago Business (which is owned by Crain Communications, also the owner of TelevisionWeek) and Pearson Education. Mr. Cohen said Collarity powers “hundreds of millions” of page views per month online.
The money guys: Collarity has raised both venture and private funding, but has not disclosed the amount. The company is generating revenue and expects to be profitable this year. Collarity makes money by sharing incremental revenue from the additional clicks it generates for its clients.
The pros: As the Web video world grows more sophisticated and competitive each day, publishers will look for services to give them an edge.
The cons: Web site optimization is becoming a competitive business, especially as it relates to video.
Background: Mr. Cohen was born and raised in Israel. He moved to the United States in 1999. He attended the University of Bar-Ilan in Israel, studying economics and computer science, and also earned a master’s in economics. Before starting Collarity, he founded software company Right Order and also served as CEO of Licom, a company that founded and managed high-tech companies in Israel. He is 54 and lives with his wife and three children in Palo Alto, Calif.
Who knew? Mr. Cohen loves to paint and makes sure to find time on the weekends to ply his hobby.