Alexander Shishow: “We’ll Make Sure Our Clips Fit Organically into the Site and Won’t Annoy People with Intrusive Advertising”

April 15 marks the end of the ICO of the Native Video Box project – a platform for promoting video clips based on modern deep machine learning and multi-tier blockchain technologies. Alexander Shishow, founder and CEO, tells us how to make money on video advertising without annoying the user, how NVB differs from YouTube and other traditional content hubs, and why video chosen to match the topic of the site rather than the specific user is now more effective.

Q: There are a huge number of projects on the video advertising market today, every one of which is trying to somehow be better than their competitors. Can you tell me in brief how you plan to conquer this market? What’s your platform all about?

A: Native Video Box is a service for situational video recommendations. We provide websites and mobile apps with a widget with several licensed videos, which are selected automatically to match the contents of the site, and which are perceived by users not as advertising but as the site’s own content. Our project also ensures the monetization of views of these clips thanks to the insertion of video ads in them.

Q: Can you give us an example of how this would work in practice?

A: Say someone has made a great video about how to bake a cake, or on travel, or on home renovations. Thanks to our platform, their content will automatically appear on sites related to the topic. In effect, we work as distributed media.

Q: How does the process of selecting clips for a specific site work, technically?

A: To start with, our block is installed on the site, which takes on the style of the website. Then our artificial intelligence algorithms go to work: they analyze the text content of the site, determine what its main topics and sub-topics are. Our platform then automatically selects clips from its own video content storage and offers them up when users view the page, first analyzing in a fraction of a second the user’s interests and the most popular queries.

Q: Why did you choose the video advertising market specifically? What is it that appealed to you?

A: I’ll just give you a few figures, and everything will be clear. Right now, video accounts for up to 80% of all Internet traffic. In 10 years the amount of video content on the Internet has grown by a factor of 42, and the capitalization of this market is more than $13 billion. Forecasts are this growth will continue.

Q: Those figures are impressive, sure, but there’s another side to the coin…

A: You mean competition?

Q: Exactly. A trend like that is bound to create serious competition that only the strongest and most high-tech companies can withstand. Is there a place here for startups like yours?

A: I have no doubt at all that there is. Why? Because we’re doing it in a way that our clips fit organically into the idea behind the site and don’t annoy people with intrusive advertising. Users will see ads only when they deliberately click on our videos. Thanks to our machine learning system and artificial intelligence, we select our videos to suit each specific site based on the site’s content, and not to suit the user. This is the main way we differ from traditional video hosting services.

Q: Is that a hint at YouTube?

A: Among others, yes.

Q: But YouTube is the largest video site on the planet, with a colossal audience. Anyone who wants to work with video goes there first. Isn’t that right? And