The player: Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media, an online video advertising network.
The play: Tremor Media pairs Web video content from more than 1,000 online publishers with ads from major brands. Tremor groups publishers into Web channels, such as sports, finance, technology and health, and then sells against those channels to marketers. “We represent only video and rich media, so we don’t touch banners or buttons,” Mr. Glickman said.
The pitch: Tremor Media’s network of sites draws 105 million unique users each month and can deliver ads in potentially 1 billion video streams each month. That scale lets Tremor Media sell at a “good price,” Mr. Glickman said. He added that Tremor can target ads via behavior and demographics on the Web. Tremor Media integrates with the existing third-party ad serving applications that media agencies already use, which “makes video buying easier,” Mr. Glickman said.
In the mix: About half the ads Tremor Media serves are pre-rolls; the other half are rich media ads. Tremor focuses exclusively on delivering ads against professionally produced content and does not include any user-created videos in its network. Publishers include A&E, TheWB.com, the Wall Street Journal, RipeTV, HealthCentral and others. Advertisers buying via Tremor include American Express, Sony, Circuit City and IBM. Tremor’s competitors include Broadband Enterprises, BrightRoll and VideoEgg.
The backstory: Mr. Glickman founded Tremor Media in 2004 with a focus on video banner ads. Tremor shifted to include in-stream video two years ago, acquiring dynamic ad-insertion technology Dynadco to accomplish this. Glickman said Tremor Media is expanding to Europe.
The money guys: Tremor Media has raised more than $20 million in venture funding in two rounds with lead investors Canaan Partners and Masthead Venture Partners. Tremor also took a strategic funding round from European Founders Fund. Tremor makes money based on a fee paid by the agencies and advertisers against the expected ad rates. Mr. Glickman said Tremor will reach profitability this year.
The pros: Tremor targets its ads and has begun delivering shorter pre-rolls. Most are 15 seconds in length, with some advertisers cutting their pre-rolls down to 5 or 10 seconds, Mr. Glickman said. “When you do a pre-roll with a frequency cap, and it’s once a session or once every 10 videos, it’s a more acceptable format.”
The cons: Consumers don’t like pre-roll ads, and that’s half of what Tremor Media delivers.
Background: Mr. Glickman was born and raised in East Brunswick, N.J. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business economics from Rutgers University. Before founding Tremor, he co-founded ContextualNet, a contextual and behavioral ad representation company. He is 32 and lives in Princeton with his wife and child.
Who knew? Mr. Glickman said he’s a pop culture trivia expert and a walking encyclopedia of Bruce Springsteen knowledge.