TubeMogul (News - Alert) has launched PlayTime, a 100 percent transparent video ad network. PlayTime will feature videos prominently on brand-safe publisher sites and within social media. TubeMogul aims to get online videos watched longer by highly targeted TV-sized audiences.

PlayTime features videos as standalone content within social media, such as Facebook (News - Alert) games and apps and on comScore 250 publisher sites. PlayTime uses its patent-pending Mass Audience Segmentation Technology, or “MAST,” to target viewers at a per-stream level to maximize a video's play time with target audiences. PlayTime essentially enables advertisers to pay only for the videos watched.

There is growing dissatisfaction with the lack of transparency and accountability among existing video ad networks. The chief concern among advertisers consists of not knowing where views are happening. Although popular video ad networks provide site lists, advertisers are usually kept in the dark about how many views occur on each site, where placements are on a page or how long viewers are actually watching. In contrast, PlayTime delivers unprecedented transparency. It lets advertisers see and control exactly what they’re buying. This is done by using TubeMogul's industry standard InPlay analytics that allows advertisers to compare performance metrics across placements in real-time.

PlayTime enables advertisers to know what sites views are coming from and in what numbers, whether views are click-to-play or auto-play, how long viewers watch before clicking away, what search terms they are using to find a video, whether the video is shared or embedded and more. This data is presented in a self-serve dashboard for advertisers along with tools for export, sharing and collaboration.

By constantly collecting and analyzing detailed viewer preference and engagement data on monthly video streams from the Internet’s top video sites and platforms, TubeMogul is able to pinpoint placements to audiences who will actually watch advertisers’ videos for a longer period of time. For instance, early field tests of TubeMogul’s collaborative filtering and targeting technology has yielded increases in video viewing-time between 200 percent and 300 percent when compared to control groups.

According to Brett Wilson, CEO and co-founder of TubeMogul, PlayTime is essentially AdSense for brand advertisers, bringing the performance metrics of search to online video advertising for the first time.