BrightRoll Clocks 500 Million Ads Served

Video advertising startup BrightRoll is announcing Tuesday it has served 500 million ads since launching last year.

“[Web ad network] Blue Lithium might do that many a day,” admitted BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti in a phone interview Monday, but he contended it’s a pretty good start for an independent video ad network.

Brightroll’s two largest customers, by volume, are Metacafe and MyVideo.de, “the German YouTube,” which alone sees 500,000 BrightRoll ad impressions per day, according to Sacerdoti.

Brightroll serves video ads as well as in-player text and banner ads, in some cases bringing in the metadata associated with a video to target ads by matching them with its context.

Sacerdoti said his company has found the best formats and placements for video ads are short (15 seconds or less) pre-roll and post-roll branded units around web video, and, perhaps counterintuitively, on pages without other video.

Brightroll faces competition that’s only increasing from companies such as Tremor Networks, Broadband Enterprises, Immen.se, YuMe Networks, and ScanScout.

Disclosure: True Ventures funds both Brightroll and NewTeeVee parent GigaOmni Media.