The Exchanges

Q How? What are you doing? Backlinking to advertisers? You're like, what is it?

A So generally speaking, there was a direct time when the engagement is higher, the monetization is higher. You know, advertisers want to present their products and services to users who are actually listening, who are actually paying attention, who are actually engaged. So on an average PlayBuzz item, the engagement is so, so much higher. It's so superior to a normal article. Just to give you a sense, the average time spent on a PlayBuzz item can be between two to four minutes. When the industry standard is, you know, is measured in seconds, unfortunately. So, since people are actually reading those articles and are actually engaging with them, the value of the advertising is much higher, and we offer, um, we offer advertisers to advertisers on those pages, and then share revenues with the publishing partner.

AI assessment note: “we offer advertisers to advertisers on those pages, and then share revenues”

Q That's okay. And how, and have you bootstrapped the company or have you raised capital?

A No, we raised capital. Uh, we raised a total of thirty-one million dollars until today. Uh, we have investors such as the Walt Disney Company, Savant Ventures, uh, and a bunch of, uh, other very credible investors. So, uh, you know, it became a very mature, a very solid business pretty quickly, but, uh, I think it's really only the tip of the iceberg. When we see where the market is going, and we see the challenges of publishers to create meaningful interaction with their users, and the challenge of advertisers not only to reach people on a massive scale, but to really inform them and really create a dialogue with them, our toolset is designed, our tool sets are designed just for them.

AI assessment note: “No, we raised capital. Uh, we raised a total of thirty-one million dollars”

Q So just to be clear again, two revenue models. One is many, many millions, dozens of millions of volume, Through your platform and the ad spend, which you keep significantly more than 10% of. The other is the branded content with the premium CPMs you charge, which sounds like is a newer offering. Is that accurate?

A Uh, it's newer, but it's, uh, it's, uh, growing very, very well. You know, I think this is really the future of advertising. Uh, advertisers want to be heard. You know, they want to spend their money on media in which the consumers are actually engaging with, not just ad blocking or, you know, flipping through really quickly and spend only a few seconds per page. We're giving them just that. We're giving them, ah, the ability to either use their standard inventory, ah, on our pages, and these are pages that users are actually spending a lot of time on, and are really engaged and really attentive to their message, or to create their own branded experience, which is, you know, I can send you, ah, ah, links to it. It's just a very, ah, addictive, very, ah, premium, very superior type of user experience, and, ah, no wonder that if, ah, a user runs into one of those items, They are more receptive to pay, to spend time on it and pay attention to the messaging. And therefore the advertiser is willing to, uh, to spend premium because they know that they're getting premium.

AI assessment note: “it's newer, but it's, uh, it's, uh, growing very, very well.”

Q Who is that? Who leads that company? All right. Tell us what the company does, Shaolin. How do you make money?

A So in most simplified terms, uh, we are an authoring platform that enables, uh, storytellers all over the world, be it, uh, premium publishers or brands, uh, or just individual authors to tell stories that are just more premium, more meaningful, more engaging. So rather than just create a textual article that, as we know, um, people don't read, right? I mean, people are not focused. There are so many industry stats showing that, uh, 80% of people, uh, bounce, uh, from text articles very quickly. Uh, don't really read, don't really engage, but if you want to tell a story that's meaningful, if you want to create a user experience around content that will actually engage users, that will actually move them, that will actually have impact on them, then you can use the Playboy set of tools. Uh, our tool set is completely free for publishers. We let them use it, and it's being used by, uh, premium publishers all over the world.

AI assessment note: “we are an authoring platform that enables, uh, storytellers all over the world”

Q Interesting. Do they give you a limited amount of inventory that for your placements on their site in a given month, or do you just, as long as you beat their other monetization streams, they'll keep giving you more inventory?

A No, it's, ah, look, it's, ah, the, the tactics can, can be different between, ah, different markets and different publishers. Our, ah, job as a platform is to accommodate the needs and, ah, specific models of each part that we work with, but generally speaking, it's a very simple proposition. You know, we, ah, we worked in the past, for instance, with brands such as, ah, American Express, ah, Citibank, ah, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and for all of them, ah, we created a very, ah, they created using our toolset A very engaging piece of content that really shows the sort of brand attributes that they want to emphasize in flying colors, and then we place those content items on different websites that we have agreements with, and we charge per view, and the reason that they're, the reason that they're willing to pay such premium rates for this engagement is because we actually guarantee them engagement.

AI assessment note: “the tactics can be different between different markets and different publishers.”

Q Understood. I wanna break down, kind of, and understand what's more important to you. So in 2016, what percentage of your revenue came from taking a percentage of spend through your platform versus that high CPM rate you guys charge?

A It's, ah, you know, it's hard for me to get into the very granular details because some of it is, ah, models that evolved a long time and, you know, constantly changing. But generally speaking, there's very high demand. Uh, you know, the, uh, obviously the scale of, uh, programmatic ads or standard IAB units such as video ads, uh, is, uh, is making it a higher volume business, but our business is shifting more and more towards branded content. We are creating new ways. Uh, in many ways you can say that publishers such as Refinery 29 and BuzzFeed and others have paved the road for this market by introducing this offering. And convincing advertisers that this is, this works and this should be charged premium. Now we're taking it a step beyond and letting everybody, letting every publisher, uh, giving them the ability to sell those kinds of campaigns through our platform and even more so create scale for the advertisers. So they're not limited for the audience of only one publisher. They can actually scale the same campaign across a variety of different publishers.

AI assessment note: “it's hard for me to get into the very granular details because some of it”