The offering, which comes at a time when paywalls are finally getting more traction, shows how publishers are also persuading visitors to pay not just with money but with their time.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram explained yesterday, we’re seeing growth in so-called “survey walls” in which websites ask visitors to fill out a survey before seeing a piece of content. The option is a good way to earn revenue from the large number of people who can’t or won’t pay for content. It also presents an attractive option for mobile platforms where more and more people are consuming content.

Selectable Media, for instance, works with both advertisers and publishers to drop a selection of short video ads in front of a story, game or video. The idea is that you have to have to watch the ad till the end before you get to see what you want; viewers get to choose which ad they want to see. While this resembles what happens when a user sees a pre-roll video on YouTube, the difference is that Selectable can plunk the clips into non-video fare like games or text articles. It also offers several different ads at once, in the hopes of increasing user engagement in the ad.

On mobile devices, it looks like this:

CEO Matt Minoff said by phone that, for now, Selectable’s primary customer for mobile is online game maker 50 Cubes which asks players to watch Google and Adobe ads in exchange for game goodies. But he says the company is negotiating deals with news sites and other traditional web publishers.

The company, which has clients like HBO and Kraft and is backed by Microsoft’s Bing fund, says nearly all users watch the ads till the end. It also claims that click-through rates and brand recall is far higher than for standard pre-roll videos. Asked whether the possibility of slow-loading videos on mobile devices might be a turn-off for publishers and users, Minoff says video optimization tools and fast phone networks mean this isn’t a big issue.

So will all this work as an alternative to paywalls? It’s too soon to say but the concept seems sound — especially as publishers keep looking for a mobile advertising strategy that doesn’t involve low-priced display ads. Users too will likely get more familiar with the option of trading their time for content; the concept is now being echoed not just with “survey walls” but with projects like star director Roland Emmerich’s idea of rewarding viewers for watching movie trailers.

(Image by Eduard Stelmakh via Shutterstock)

And that bottleneck is … advertising. While developers and publishers have evolved to support a digital video eco-system, advertisers are a step behind. The problem is common to all sorts of media transitions: the impulse to replicate old experiences on new platforms.

YouTube’s director of product management, Shiva Rajaraman, summed up the situation at this week’s Mobilize conference. Rajaraman explained that many conventional constrains of video advertising — especially the 15 or 30 second time limits — are artificial and dictated by the strictures of traditional TV. But in the online digital environment, many of those conventions don’t apply and there is endless opportunity for new types of creative ads.

Ad agencies, however, have been slow to pick up the ball, according to Matt Minoff, the CEO of Selectable Media. Minoff’s company makes a business of dropping short video ads into places where viewers might encounter a paywall or an offer to buy something. In practice, this might means that a video game player can receive virtual goods in exchange for watching a video. The player might see a screen like this:

If the player wants to earn the virtual cash, they can choose from a variety of videos:

After watching the video, the viewer receives a benefit such as virtual goods credit or access to an article. Minoff says publishers are embracing the ads and viewers are willing to watch them. His company is profitable and growing but he says appropriate ads are in short supply.

“What holds back advertisers from taking advantage of new platforms is that have to repurpose creative built for TV. They’re utilizing 30 second TV spots online and for mobile.”

Minoff believes that ad agencies should consider reallocating their budgets to create more custom content for online platforms. While this would take a larger investment into creative, the potential pay-off could be large if it improves advertisers’ ability to deliver the rights ads in the right situation.

(Image by Jacek Chabraszewski via Shutterstock)