Thinking in content verticals

ProSiebenSat.1 established glomex in May 2016. Explaining his monetisation master plan, Michael Jaschke, glomex founder and CEO, said: “The world of entertainment is changing dramatically, and glomex is the first platform to address this change in its entire complexity. All market participants can profit from the trend towards free, unlimited online content distribution.”

Jaschke suggested that content owners, publishers and marketers can profit from video distribution beyond YouTube and Facebook. On the issue of unique monetisation strategies, he said: “We see ourselves as an alternative to the two market-dominating providers: glomex offers both large and small content producers/owners access to a network of premium publishers, and with little technical effort and no fixed costs or service fees.”

“When talking about ‘publishers’ we always mean website publishers – on any size and subject, he added. “Of course, there are successful TV formats on the glomex marketplace but, at the same time, there is also professionally produced web-only content.”

On this new marketplace, every piece of content finds its audience and every website publisher is spoilt for choice. What analytics does glomex gift to users?

“Gaining the right insights from the data obtained is certainly key to success. At glomex we have a dedicated team developing our own tools. They tell every partner which content performs best (regarding CTR, for example) in an easy-to-use dashboard,” said Jaschke.

“Our marketing campaign says: ‘Turn digital video into real money. It’s as easy as pressing play’,” he added. ”Editors can browse and search through our video library, select videos, put together playlists and configure what their player should look like – all within our easy-to-use web interface. With one click, they create the embed code that they copy into their CMS, and that’s it.”

The constant demands of producing endless streams of quality content will start to tell, and we might see consolidation in the content delivery side. Will media exchanges have an impact in terms of assisting content producers to stay active and competitive?

“For content owners, we see glomex as an essential part of any production and distribution process. The content owner has a single partner who takes care of presenting and promoting content on the marketplace, streaming it at best quality to all devices, plus handling rights management, analytics and billing,” said Jaschke. “So the owner will be able to focus his resources on what he does best – producing content.

“In order to stay competitive, content producers need to be very flexible and able to produce high-quality content at very short notice, while keeping production costs at a minimum,” he added.

How big a deal in this context are ‘fair advertising revenue shares’?

“This business model only works if all partners – the content owner, the publisher and of course the advertiser – profit in a fair way,” said Jaschke. “An important prerequisite, therefore, is transparency – which is why glomex offers a simple rev share model.”

“In order to stay competitive, content producers need to be very flexible and able to produce high-quality content at very short notice, while keeping production costs at a minimum”

How many takers does Jaschke need for his business plan to happen 24/7? And what new or horizon technologies will help him add further market services?

“It’s not a question of a number of takers, but of connecting to the right content owners with the right publishers. Therefore, we think in content verticals,” he said. “Having started with the most promising clusters of entertainment, celebrity and lifestyle and ‘docutainment’, we consequently included general news, sports, cars and motoring, and most recently food.

“This is all based on rising demand. Regarding new developments, we’ll focus on new features to help publishers monetise their websites more efficiently, e.g. with cross-border solutions,” he added. “Currently we are rolling out our new Outstream content plug-In and we are considering live stream options. Generating efficient new advertising opportunities is our driving force.”