Digital First Ventures Announces Real-Time Video Partnership With Tout

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Digital First Ventures Announces Real-Time Video Partnership With Tout.

A Big day here at Tout HQ, after months of discussions and tests, we are thrilled to announce that the 2nd largest Newspaper Group in the U.S. , Digital First Media – will be deploying the Premium Tout platform product to all 92 of their leading newspaper titles across the country, covering over 60MM unique users per month in digital audience.

Let me explain why this announcement is so important:

  1. For two years since officially spinning-out of SRI International, we have been passionately evangelizing how the real-time visual web will fundamentally impact not only how we connect, communicate and engage with each other but also with the media we consume. As Digital First Media joins the ranks of our other partners, The Wall Street Journal, NBC/Universal, the WWE, Lagardere, The BBC, and others…the tangible transformation of how they now engage with their audience going forward is clear.
  2. DFM like so many other large media publishers are working hard to successfully serve an audience who’s consumption of content is now done almost entirely real-time (as it happens), who is now following the content they love via mobile at least 50% of the time, and where the consumption pattern is leaning more and more towards purely visual media, and away from text. (Show me Don’t Tell Me!)

Thousands of DFM reporters and journalists will know be equipped on their Android and IOS smartphones to simply and easily capture video updates while reporting on breaking news or developing stories in the field. With one click, those updates are pushed to all social platforms including Twitter, Facebook, G+, Pinterest,  and Linkedin. In addition, these updates are instantly (less than 15-seconds) pushed to real-time feeds that reside on each of the 92 Newspaper websites.

DFM will be selling $15-$25CPM video pre-roll ads against rich and timely video updates that cost them almost nothing to produce. In addition, these same real-time feeds (widgets) can optionally carry real-time video updates from our other Tout partners such as Wall Street Journal, CNBC, BBC, ESPN, Entertainment Tonight, Bloomberg amongst hundreds of others.

A perfect example of what we call the Real-Time Visual Web at work, and in this case, delivering an exceptional consumer experience that is in -line with where consumer behavior is going (mobile, real-time, visual) – as well as exceptional economics and CPM’s that are much higher than what is common today across these publications.

MD

The Quick update from the Tout Front!

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Looking at my last blog post is like walking into the newspaper presses before a bomb went off….I didn’t quite get a chance to finish my thoughts on that one – but suffice to say have we’ve been pretty busy since April 2011…when we launched Tout.

So here is the quick update.

Our goal with Tout is to power an entirely new kind of social-engagement and dialogue – to date, the real time social conversation has been explicitly virtual, made up of avatars, pixels and 140 characters of text. To put it in very simple terms – we are working to make the virtual much more human, real – or differently put… to enable a much wider group of people to engage in the real-time social conversation….by powering the social conversation with a media form factor that we all biologically know and understand…wonderfully short video.