When measuring how effective your company’s video marketing is at converting customers, amount of views are overrated. With the degree of competition for attention that exists today, you cannot just settle for views, you need to ensure that viewers are actually paying attention to your video in an engaged and attentive way. While analytics platform have a difficult time tracking this, this is where Limbik excels. The audience intelligence platform for video provides all of the basic analytic measurements for your video while tracking how well each potential customer is engaged. So if you have a hunch that you need to track your video smarter, check out Limbik.
AlleyWatch chatted with the Limbik team about the startup and how a few lines of coding can turn your video around.
Tell us about the product or service.
Limbik is an audience intelligence platform for video. By simply installing a couple lines of code on your website, Limbik will tell you how many people are watching your videos, who they are, and the degree to which they’re paying attention.
Limbik collects more than 60 real-time video attention metrics, including viewability (in-view), audibility, exposure time, screen real estate, average minute audience, and more from all your videos regardless of player or platform.
We strongly believe that simply tracking views or completion rates isn’t an effective way to measure how your videos are performing. Rather, we think that measuring attention (how a viewer is consuming your content) is superior as it’s a clear indicator of how people are engaging with your brand. And if you can understand what your audience is paying attention to, you can influence them to do anything.
How is it different?
There are three key items, which in our view differentiate our product.
First and most simply, Limbik measures what matters. Limbik provides users with the ability to track, measure and analyze attention, providing a true cross-platform view of digital audiences across computers, smartphones, tablets and other connected devices.
Second, Limbik is not a hosting provider, rather an invisible layer that collects data from your video content – regardless of player – and returns it to your Limbik account where you can measure, analyze and act.
Third, Limbik’s integrates a variety of third party data sources providing our customers with an unparalleled level of granularity regarding their viewers, including demographic and psychographic information such as income, age, ethnicity, number of children, and level of education.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
Anyone who publishers or curates video on their website will get tremendous value out of using Limbik. That market is very large. 83% of companies in business today use video and 85% of all online video is put on a website. That is more than what’s promoted via organic social media, email newsletters, and paid social media. Before Limbik, the market lacked a dedicated, player-agnostic, analytics solution for all of this on-platform video.
Our customers include, publishers, brands, and agencies looking to fully understand and engage their digital audiences. Limbik supports most HTML 5 video players including YouTube, Vimeo, and Brightcove so our reach is incredibly wide.
What is the business model?
Limbik is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that anyone can try free for 14 days. All plans include unlimited videos, unlimited viewer sessions, full reporting capabilities, and smart and fast support. Monthly plans range from $49 – $199, and enterprise plans are also available. The monthly price is primarily based on the period of data retention a customer requires.
We are opening Limbik up to the public on April 3rd but in the meantime, you can request access by visiting limbik.tv and signing up.
What inspired the business?
Prior to founding Limbik, I started and ran a company, called Newlio, which provided research services built around a proprietary survey optimization platform. We kept getting asked by our customers if there was a way to implicitly track the performance of video. So the problem, presented itself to us. We searched the industry and realized that video content was being measured in a superficial way and that a dedicated analytics platform for video content didn’t exist. At around the same time, I read Suhail Doshi’s (Mixpanel) blog post from 2012 calling for an end to “bulls**t metrics” regarding website and app analytics. The industry was tracking video analytics in an old-fashioned way and there was demand for something better. That’s when we decided to build Limbik.
What’s the future of video for 2017?
Video will continue to grow and become more ubiquitous. More people will cut their cords and consume the majority of their video content online. I think that is very apparent. Our vision though for 2017 and beyond is that the industry will begin to reconsider how they measure video. That is what we’re obsessed with. We urge all video content creators, distributors, and publishers to start thinking about their video’s performance in terms of audience rather than just looking at simplistic metrics like plays and completion rate.
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
The best advice I never got is to be crystal clear on what you need to measure and get yourself to a point where decisions are no longer driven by assumptions as quickly as possible. As Reid Hoffman said, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed) and Shane Smith (Vice). The way we consume content has changed… the fundamental concept of what it means to pay attention has changed. These guys, more than just about anyone else, understand and have taken advantage of these changes. In our quest to move the industry from simplistic video metrics, like plays and completion rates, to measuring what actually matters… audience attention, I couldn’t think of more powerful allies.
Why did you launch in New York?
The pace and energy of an early stage company directly reflects that of NYC, or vice versa. And, all the human, social and financial capital you need to get a startup off the ground is literally around the corner. There is no better place to be in business today.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Tuome in the East Village.