SpotX and Vemba have teamed up to ensure that video syndication is profitable for both video content providers and online publishers. The companies have jointly launched a new product that enables publishers to set minimum profit margin parameters which determine whether a pre-selected video from Vemba’s library should actually play.

SpotX’s SVP, Global Revenue Sean Buckley and Vemba’s CEO Garrick Tiplady explained to me how the product addresses critical syndication challenges and works at a practical level.

With the new joint product, publishers using the Vemba platform still identify which videos they want to incorporate into their sites as a first step, which are then added to their content management system.

But rather than those videos simply playing when the page loads, a new step is introduced. When it comes time for a video to play, SpotX does a pre-call to see what ad (if any) would play prior to the video. If the CPM of that ad is above the threshold that would yield the specified margin to the publisher then the video plays. If not, or there’s no ad, then no player loads in the page and no video plays.

Sean emphasized that given the high rate of video ad fulfillment being done programmatically, it is difficult to predict what the monetization associated with syndicated video will be due to multiple factors. That means currently content providers could be serving videos and publishers incorporating them into their pages that could be unprofitable for either or both parties depending on the ad revenue. The new product reduces this risk and ensures syndicated videos at least meet required minimum profitability.

Sean and Garrick noted that the product has been developed over the past 4 months and results from Vemba integrating with SpotX’s Direct AdOS SDK. Neither SpotX nor Vemba are currently integrating with any other partner to enable this type of profitability assessment at the video level.

Vemba currently works with 95 different content providers and has 500 publishers in its network. SpotX works with over 700 publishers globally.