Jivox Affiliate Program Debuts

• Publisher partnership: Online publishers make available a co-branded version of the Jivox online video ad service to their advertisers and market the Jivox service across their sites.

• Agency partnership: Advertising, marketing and creative services agencies offer online video advertising services to their clients and manage client relationships through a Jivox master account.

• Referral partnership: Publishers refer their advertisers and Web site visitors to Jivox, where they can easily create, publish, and manage their own targeted video ads.

All Jivox affiliate partners will receive specific customer promotions and savings to drive Jivox registrations and sales targeting; highly effective business-building links, creative assets, and proven "best practices" to drive conversions, according to the company. Plus, affiliates will get a monthly newsletter with updates on promotions, best-converting links and more.

In addition, publisher partners will receive a custom access page that is co-branded and hosted by Jivox, as well as a publisher portal that enables them to administer and manage advertiser campaigns internally.

"The Jivox affiliate program allows all our partners to participate in the fast-growing online video advertising category by providing three levels of integration into our online video platform," said Jim Gustke, vice president of marketing and product management at Jivox. "The Jivox online video service is a modular platform that includes ad creation, online hosting and targeting and access to the online publisher network, which allows our partners to offer all or some of its components. No matter how our partners choose to integrate, by signing up as a Jivox online affiliate, they can give their customers access to highly effective, locally targeted video advertising,"

For more information on how to join the Jivox affiliate program, visit the Jivox affiliate page.

SpotMixer Joins AdWords

SpotMixer offers marketers the ability to cost-effectively create, target and manage online video ad campaigns through a self-serve model. With SpotMixer, online businesses now have the option to create and produce their own ads, oversee their ad campaigns, and closely manage distribution of those ads, both online and on television.

SpotMixer's tools are based on One True Media's self-service video creation and distribution platform, a video-editing site used by consumers to produce and share professional-quality online videos. The tools are so intuitive, according to the company, that any business can produce professional-quality video ads, using its own videos and photos, and distribute them to targeted audiences with just a few clicks. The service is designed specifically for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Video SEO Versus Viral

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.

• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site.

• Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.

• Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.

• Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

What's in Store for 2009?

• Death of the online video ad model: Video advertising, in terms of running ads on top of the video player itself, as opposed to, say, creating a video ad you place in an ad network, is a broken model that is extremely unlikely to work long term because of the inventory shortage and the prohibitively high cost of producing creative. We will see online video advertising shift to a subscription-based model, as well as more businesses creating and marketing their own branded videos.

• Jumping on the services bandwagon: Companies that are not currently selling services are going to clamor to enter the application and services spheres in 2009. With the commoditization of content delivery networks (CDNs) and the high end of the market already locked up, providers will use services as their meal ticket into the mid-market. In short, these types of companies will try to figure out how to go from providing the "plumbing" to providing value-add, and the majority of these moves will involve online video services.

• Standards become a battleground issue: The standardization of online video players and content distribution has been a splintered effort at best. Most vendors are reluctant to embrace universal open standards that would enable companies to easily develop their own branded players for fear that it would cannibalize their business. Meanwhile, Akamai and a handful of other companies are pushing for an open player standard with the Open Video Player initiative, but their proposal fails to improve upon the current implied Adobe standard and is more tailored for engineers rather than Web developers. In 2009, the discussions around online video standards will heat up and there will be clashing initiatives, but no accord will be reached.

Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com