Editor’s Note: We have LiveRail invites! Head over to the advertiser or the publisher invitation request page and mention that you’re a Rev2 reader in the ‘Tell us something about yourself’ section.
LiveRail, a video distribution and advertising platform, launched yesterday in private-beta. Privately funded, LiveRail was developed by an international team based in the UK. The concept of LiveRail is essentially to be a platform for publishers while providing advertisers a way monetize it through a unique ‘AdSense for Video’-like approach.
With LiveRail, ads are targetted to the user using a variety of variables [location, content, language, etc.] and presented in 
rotating text form in a section below the video. While the user is watching a video, he can choose to click on any that he finds interesting, which overlaps the existing video and brings up the ad until it finishes.
LiveRail uses a concept first introduced by Google where advertisers bid on keywords on a per-click basis, although a notable factor in its ad determining technology is the popularity of a certain ad — which is balanced equally with the bidding amount. For example, as an advertiser who wants the most exposure for your campaign, you can either bid a relatively high amount or focus on the actual ad itself (and its content — to increase its clickability/liking) and get away with a smaller bid.
Of course, unlike some of the other interesting video ad startups, LiveRail aims to also be a publishing platform (on par with Revver et al). Publishers can upload their video content and keep a 50% of the ad revenue share. One of the key differences in LiveRail’s concept, however, is that they don’t themselves aim to organize and present the content on their website (in the manner of YouTube, for example), but simply provide publishers with an embed code to put on their blogs and websites. Such a concept yields more professional interest seeing publishers are always in control of where their content is published.
The LiveRail developers hope this model will encourage fun, interesting advertising as advertisers compete for extra exposure, which will result in, among other things, their publishers getting a good revenue stream. You can see an example of the concept here.
