Dow Jones Joins Brightcove's Ad and Syndication Network

Dow Jones Online has officially joined Brightcove’s new video syndication and ad networks. The publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online, MarketWatch.com and Barron’s Online has been using Brightcove’s service on its sites in beta for a few weeks to distribute hundreds of news, commentary and lifestyle video clips and monetize that content through pre-roll video and banner ads.

“What we’re trying to do is deliver our content in as many places, and as many different media and technologies as our users are looking for it,” said Dow Jones Online President Gordon McLeod.

Microsoft and Lexus are the exclusive sponsors of the video content on all three sites. “There’s a much higher CPM for these,” McLeod told ClickZ, noting, “Video advertising is in such high demand.”

The ads are being targeted contextually. All ads running on the publisher’s sites as well as on third-party sites through Brightcove’s Syndication Marketplace are sold by Dow Jones. In the first month, Dow Jones delivered 500,000 video streams through Brightcove, according to the publisher.

Both advertisers have used a new ad format developed by Brightcove which combines a pre-roll video spot with an in-player display ad that hovers above listings of other video clips, then collapses into a banner unit once the pre-roll is complete. When users click on the side-unit to visit the ad landing page, the video content clip pauses, and can be resumed when the user returns to the video player on the publisher’s site.

“There’s clearly an opportunity for programmers to provide a richer opt-in advertising experience for the consumer, and an opportunity for the marketer to express an advertiser offer in a much richer way than a video commercial,” said Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire. The company Monday unveiled an ad-supported video network for small content creators.

Dow Jones is employing the video firm’s technology to manage and distribute video content and accompanying ads, as well as syndicate clips through Brightcove’s affiliate network onto third-party Web sites, subject to approval by Dow Jones. The publisher has been distributing 50 video pieces each week across its three Web sites, taking advantage of its production facilities in New York and San Francisco.

Content ranges from correspondent reports and interviews to lifestyle segments with celebrities to clips from the Barron’s Online “Art of Successful Investing” conference series featuring interviews with financial investment experts.

“One thing that’s unique is [Dow Jones is] cross-pollinating content from multiple media outlets,” said Allaire. “They have a library of TV programs they’ve originally produced, and so they can program them into the [various channels].” Other news publishers in Brightcove’s network include Reuters and WPNI’s WashingtonPost.com, Newsweek.com and Slate.

“Because of the resources in our news department, our ability to become a multimedia news force is very important,” said Dow Jones VP of Television and Video Bob Leverone.

Publishing content into a set of HTML documents with unique URLs that can be readily crawled by search engines, Brightcove aims to facilitate categorization and searching of the content it helps distribute. Dow Jones can tag content with keywords using the system to optimize its video for search and RSS feeds, and set up rules for distribution within its own properties. For instance, the publisher may make market analysis pieces accessible on its Wall Street Journal Online and MarketWatch.com sites while restricting opinion clips to the Journal site.

Dow Jones Online plans on working with the Web video service to develop additional video players and related ad offerings in the future.