THE SETTING

The Vidible developers had created wireframes in the absence of a design team before I joined the company. I began picking the low-hanging fruit in the UI to improve the user experience while grappling to comprehend this new business model and industry.

THE CHARACTERS

Users of the original Vidible platform ranged from Video Producers who were creating high-quality videos with little idea how to monetize them, to Publishers wanting video content on their sites, to advertisers seeking eyeballs. Discovering a single exchange for all of these needs was great news for everyone.

Main personas:

• Video Producers

• Publishers

• Advertisers

THE CONFLICT

Imagine you are a video producer with a library of quality content that you know has value, but you don’t know what to do with it.

Imagine you are a website or app publisher that has an audience with an insatiable hunger for new video content. How do you keep your site fresh and retain your audience?

Imagine you are an advertiser wanting to target a specific audience through video ads. How do you find the audience? How do you find great video content?

This was the scene in 2012 when Vidible was born. Nothing like this existed at the time and its value was readily appreciated by the online ad industry.

So, less of a conflict and more of an opportunity.

THE BIG IDEA

By creating the world’s first video exchange, we can transform the digital media marketplace

Founded In 2012, the Vidible video exchange platform enabled buyers and sellers of digital media to manage and monetize video content across all devices. Vidible transformed the digital media environment by creating the first open marketplace for video.

The Vidible Exchange Platform, VXP, provided clients with full transparency and control and a powerful set of tools to manage and monetize content. Through VXP, clients could harness the power of Vidible's comprehensive yet flexible solutions optimized for controlling and distributing video content. From management and discovery to analytics and syndication, Vidible enabled clients to optimize video programming, video management and video monetization.

THE RESOLUTION

Dozens of workflows and UI tweaks were tested and refined in the first 18 months. The menu changed to reflect the business needs being expressed by our investors and early adopters. New features were constantly being added and modified.

The VXP had matured significantly, surpassing a billion streams. Acquiring Vidible became attractive to AOL who purchased the company and merged the VXP with an Israeli team building a similar platform for their Owned & Operated (O&O) properties including Huffpost, AutoBlog, TechCrunch, Engadget and several others. A major consolidation and redesign emerged.

THE RESULTS

Two years later, Verizon purchased AOL and Yahoo to form Oath. Two years after that, Verizon rebranded Oath as “Verizon Media”. At that time, Vidible was rebranded as “Video Syndication”.

Users of the Video Syndication platform ranged from Verizon Media’s O&O publishers, 3rd party publishers, content creators, sales teams, account managers, ad aggregators, arbitrage resellers, OTT app developers, advertisers and more. The platform contained over 55K unique users from most countries in the world where the platform was translated into dozens of languages. 

Then…

Verizon sold its media wing to a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management in 2021 for $5B. The Video Syndication platform was sunset soon afterwards. The VS feature set was merged with the Yahoo SSP. In 2023, Yahoo sunset the SSP in favor is Google Ad Manager.