BLUE CHIP FROM DAY-ONE:
In 2002, we set out to launch Ultramercial during, what some would say, the worse possible time - The Dot Bomb. Confident in our value-exchange model we focused on a media darling, Salon.com, who had burned through $80 million in investment capital and had yet to show a profit. We figured if we could right their ship, we were on to something.

Five days after we launched with Salon, TIME Magazine called us and said this model was exactly what they were looking for. Two years later, Salon had their first profitable quarter with 47% of their revenue coming from the Ultramercial "Site Pass". Two months later we closed our seed round for $2.5 Million from New York private equity bank Loeb Partners . We saved Salon, defined a new advertising segment and were definitely on to something.

Since then we have worked with top industry partners such as TIME, The Economist, Walt Disney Internet Group, TheStreet, Virgin Mobile and many more. Click here for complete list. In carving out the path to engagement-for-access advertising, we have become the leader and expert in understanding this space.

ENGAGEMENT DEFINED:
The way we see it, engagement is divided into two important parts:

Part 1: Opening up a two-way experience or dialogue with each viewer as they interact with your brand, with 100% share of their attention.

Part 2: Standardizing and repeating this process, with performance metrics to measure the time of engagement, the specific actions taken within the commercials, and actions taken to learn more, such as click-through rates.

Since every Ultramercial ad begins with the user's input and an opt-in, we offer one-to-one marketing engagement to our advertisers for less than the cost of a keyword search click. The viewers' attention is their social contract to earn premium content. Our research has shown that a majority of people (60 to 95%) are willing to engage with an interactive commercial in order to keep their content free. In our 5+-year operating history we have seen 75-85% of Ultramercial viewers engage our commercials to completion. Asking a viewer to accept their engagement with a brand as "payment" is not only possible, it is most importantly repeatable.

Those pushing out one-way messages with no explicit value to the viewer are not setting new bars in advertising engagement. They are still inside the monologue model, hoping and waiting for someone to react.

THE FUTURE:
As we look forward to the next five years and beyond, we see ourselves positioned to define what a "TV 2.0 Commercial" will be. Certainly that will include guaranteed interactivity and new monetization strategies.

Our technology will continue to evolve to meet the needs of mobile, Wi-Fi networks, P2P and TV and we'll keep our "transaction" model running across all browsers and all platforms that are continually being updated.

But most important, we want to continue to provide respectful advertising solutions that are a win-win-win for viewers, advertisers and content owners. Perhaps with an extra emphasis on advertisers, because after all, the advertiser is paying to keep content free.