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Japan’s video production startup Viibar finds $3.5M in funding, partners with Nikkei

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Viibar, the startup specializing in all things video productions, announced on Tuesday that it has it has secured funding from and partnered with Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a leading Japan economics newspaper hereafter referred to as Nikkei. The company plans to work closely with Nikkei’s newly established digital marketing organization called N Brand Studio, in building a team to develop and provide new services and advertising products that go beyond the company’s current main role of supporting the creation of video materials. Viibar CEO Yuta Kamisaka stated concretely that in the spring of 2017 they will launch a new media project on Nikkei Style, which is managed by Nikkei. In addition to this, they will enter into product development that includes video content and is currently being offered by Nikkei as a set for tie-up advertisement, etc., in addition to also supporting content marketing for companies. Along with this business partnership, Viibar also received approximately 400 million yen (around $3.5 million US) in the latest funding round from Dentsu Digital Holdings and Globis Capital Partners as well as Nikkei. Details such as the valuation and payment date were not disclosed. Dentsu and Globis also…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Viibar, the startup specializing in all things video productions, announced on Tuesday that it has it has secured funding from and partnered with Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a leading Japan economics newspaper hereafter referred to as Nikkei. The company plans to work closely with Nikkei’s newly established digital marketing organization called N Brand Studio, in building a team to develop and provide new services and advertising products that go beyond the company’s current main role of supporting the creation of video materials.

Viibar CEO Yuta Kamisaka stated concretely that in the spring of 2017 they will launch a new media project on Nikkei Style, which is managed by Nikkei. In addition to this, they will enter into product development that includes video content and is currently being offered by Nikkei as a set for tie-up advertisement, etc., in addition to also supporting content marketing for companies.

Nikkei Style

Along with this business partnership, Viibar also received approximately 400 million yen (around $3.5 million US) in the latest funding round from Dentsu Digital Holdings and Globis Capital Partners as well as Nikkei. Details such as the valuation and payment date were not disclosed. Dentsu and Globis also participated in the previous round.

Viibar, who has supported the crowdsourcing of video materials for companies, has undertaken a new development: an investment and corporate alliance with the media. From the onset, they did not simply provide crowdsourcing for video production, but also dabbled in the media, with funds received from Yahoo Japan in their previous round, and Bouncy, their version of distributed contents. With recent developments, it appears they are ready to go from testing the waters to jumping straight in head first.

These past few years Viibar has been riding the crowdsourcing wave by gathering creators on-line and streamlining production through their production platform. The company has given new options for video production where previously there was only one, to order from a professional production company, and since its inception in 2013 they have assembled some 3000 creators online with the number of companies using their service climbing to 600.

Viibar’s key feature is the so-called “production studio on the cloud”, and there is no need to worry about quality control if a specific creator leaves the production, or a shortage of resources to meet the demands of a large order, which can occur with a general production company. Also, in many cases, the produced contents gets “distributed”, which means the media is necessary. Apart from traditional television and signage, of course, distribution on the Internet is the goal for their creative endeavors.

As mentioned in the release, it is not the first time for Viibar to support the video production of other media. However, this time, with the inclusion of funding, it feels like they intend to expand into a media company, rather than stop at the crowdsourcing of video production/practical knowledge for creating commissioned videos. In fact, even though their business scheme with Nikkei is still under wraps, upon talking with Kamisaka examples of where they are headed, revenue shares, etc. (all points not in the official release) became quite clear.

Viibar has moved from crowdsourcing a little closer to a outsourcing production platform. So, will their video marketing business open up considerably by collaborating with the Nikkei brand?

Here Kamisaka emphasized the word “quality” when it comes to creative pursuits. In the first place, crowdsourcing has some difficulties in quality control regarding work on specific smaller sections of a larger project. However, Viibar covers this with their system and operations, successfully producing a quality top brands can utilize.

Kamisaka elaborated on the cost as well.

The price, that is to say the time and effort that is usually put in by people,  compared to a major production company is reasonable. Although, a production company with various people working together internally beats crowdsourcing that doesn’t value quality. For our company, we believe jobs that are just cheap are not work for creators, so it’s good this way.

Since there is no doubt that the balance of quality and cost will lead to profit in the end, the pricing and profit margin of each video advertising product they will sell with the Nikkei brand becomes interesting.

Over the past few years Viibar has constructed a system that can flexibly deliver high-quality content to the world, and from now will use brand-name media and distribution to move to a new stage. This then becomes a test of whether they can expand as a business by taking this next step away from a production platform.

I think it comes down to whether or not we can make a strong brand. A strong brand means that the media has a fan base and its CPA (cost per acquisition) is low, and if this is solid, then it doesn’t matter whether the content is offered via a platform or via our own media.

Kamisaka continued:

Media is a collection of content. We have a commitment to creating an environment where it is possible to focus on creative pursuits. We aren’t just intermediaries matching creators with projects, but through evaluating creators, and paying attention to various results, we have been able to confirm that this is the correct direction to take. Recently, there have been various problems in the area of content, but in the end they’re likely to demand a way of work and manner of creation that is more productive.

Advertisers, the media, creators– with the power of technology is it possible to put them successfully on the cloud? It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

Viibar partners with Yahoo Japan, looking to help companies produce attractive video content

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Viibar, the Japanese startup focused on a crowdsourced video production service, announced on Monday that it has fundraised from 700 million yen (about $5.8 million) from Yahoo Japan, Globis Capital Partners (GCP), and Gree Ventures. GCP and Gree Ventures also participated in the previous funding round. In tandem with the funding, Viibar partnered with Yahoo Japan and invited Osamu Aranami, Corporate Officer and President of Yahoo Japan’s marketing solution company, to its board of management, aiming to develop new services/video advertising businesses by offering video production resources to the top-tier Japanese internet portal. See also: Japanese crowdsourcing platform for video production raises $3M Viibar wins OnLab demo day with crowdsourced video production solution Viibar has acquired over 2,000 crowdsourced video creators to date. According to the company’s CEO Yuta Kamisaka, the main purpose of the funding at this time is to strengthen human resources, planning to enhance their 40-person team to 100 people including contract-based workers. In addition to human resources with prowess in crowdsourced video production services, the company will more focus on hiring data analysts, adtech engineers and other experts who will work on joint efforts with Yahoo Japan. What’s extremely interesting about this funding is that Yahoo Japan didn’t take a large…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Viibar, the Japanese startup focused on a crowdsourced video production service, announced on Monday that it has fundraised from 700 million yen (about $5.8 million) from Yahoo JapanGlobis Capital Partners (GCP), and Gree Ventures. GCP and Gree Ventures also participated in the previous funding round.

In tandem with the funding, Viibar partnered with Yahoo Japan and invited Osamu Aranami, Corporate Officer and President of Yahoo Japan’s marketing solution company, to its board of management, aiming to develop new services/video advertising businesses by offering video production resources to the top-tier Japanese internet portal.

See also:

Viibar has acquired over 2,000 crowdsourced video creators to date. According to the company’s CEO Yuta Kamisaka, the main purpose of the funding at this time is to strengthen human resources, planning to enhance their 40-person team to 100 people including contract-based workers. In addition to human resources with prowess in crowdsourced video production services, the company will more focus on hiring data analysts, adtech engineers and other experts who will work on joint efforts with Yahoo Japan.

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From the right: Viibar CEO Yuta Kamisaka and CTO Takeshi Matsuoka. Matsuoka is former CTO of Japanese internet giant Mixi.

What’s extremely interesting about this funding is that Yahoo Japan didn’t take a large stake in Viibar, despite that fact that this kind of minority investment is usually made by YJ Capital, the investment arm of Yahoo Japan, rather than Yahoo Japan itself. Kamisaka said he couldn’t yet disclose details about what the two companies are planning to do but they will hold a press briefing to unveil it in the near future.

However, I would like to make a few predictions concerning what will happen to Viibar, based on our interviews with Kamisaka. His phrase “data-driven video production” provided a clue. He explained:

Since our business has become profitable, we will use up the funds in a relatively short-term – maybe in two years – to establish a structure for an IPO. Details will be announced at a press briefing later on, but we plan to aggregate data from Yahoo Japan and other partners, associating them with video creatives via online dashboard so that advertisers can improve on performance for online promotion campaigns.

Upon hearing of combined data analytics and video, if you come up with the concept of distributed content model, you should be proud to count yourself among the media geeks. Under this concept, content publishers don’t intend to invite readers to their sites but rather measure its influence by consolidating engagements through such leading social media as Facebook and Twitter.

Visual content in the form of videos and images is considered to carry a great influence in distributed content sites so even NowThis News shut down its website and lives exclusively on live social media platform activities.

As a result, news media sites focused on the distributed content model are now forced to explore more efficient means of posting a content item instead of a website containing it. They will need to take more care about when to publish a content item, how to write a catchy headline, and how to replace it, such as with a new, more suitable types of content that match each of the multiple social media platforms.

In view of the process exploring the most efficient types of content to attract viewers, I think they need to adopt a similar approach to what typical adtech solution providers have been offering. Like A/B testing in developing an attractive banner ad, the distributed type content sites will need to produce many types of content and test them out.

In addition to crowdsourced video production platforms if Viibar had provided an automated marketing solution that allows media sites to see which social media platforms, when and what visual content should be distributed to attract viewers the most, it would be useful to propose efficient video ads for clients.

If my predictions come true, Yahoo’s intense interest in and high valuation for Viibar now makes good sense. In a recent interview, Kamisaka didn’t explicitly tell us anything about this but provided the following comment:

Until now, video production have been an all-or-nothing bet for companies in terms of what taste attracts users. However, Viibar will open up the world of video productions to the bottom-up approach from the creator side. So our platform will enable companies to implement a rapid PDCA (plan-do-check-action) cycle upon online video campaigning.

Translated by Conyac crowdsourced translation service
Edited by Masaru Ikeda and “Tex” Pomeroy

Japanese crowdsourcing platform for video production raises $3M

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See the original article in Japanese Viibar, startup which operates a crowdsourcing platform specializing in video production raised approximately 300 million yen in total ($3 million) from Globis Capital Partners and GREE Ventures. Further details were not disclosed. Viibar was founded in April of 2013, with the aim of offering high-quality video for affordable prices, matching creators (like video directors and videographers) with clients. According to Viibar CEO, Yuta Kamisaka, a few hundred creators have been already registered on Viibar. Since last year, the company has utilized crowdsourcing to outsource work from a number of clients, including Rakuten and Mixi. The short video below was created for Mixi. Kamisaka started his first career at a video-production company that makes TV and video ads. He gained some experience in video production, worked on the marketing team at Rakuten, and then he founded Viibar. He participated Open Network Lab’s incubation program as part of its seventh batch, where Viibar won The Best Team Award on demo day. Shogo Kawada, a co-founder of DeNA and an angel investor, has also joined the team. Currently Japan’s crowdsourcing platforms can be roughly divided into two types. One type has all processes completed within the platform…

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See the original article in Japanese

Viibar, startup which operates a crowdsourcing platform specializing in video production raised approximately 300 million yen in total ($3 million) from Globis Capital Partners and GREE Ventures. Further details were not disclosed.

Viibar was founded in April of 2013, with the aim of offering high-quality video for affordable prices, matching creators (like video directors and videographers) with clients. According to Viibar CEO, Yuta Kamisaka, a few hundred creators have been already registered on Viibar. Since last year, the company has utilized crowdsourcing to outsource work from a number of clients, including Rakuten and Mixi. The short video below was created for Mixi.

Kamisaka started his first career at a video-production company that makes TV and video ads. He gained some experience in video production, worked on the marketing team at Rakuten, and then he founded Viibar.

He participated Open Network Lab’s incubation program as part of its seventh batch, where Viibar won The Best Team Award on demo day. Shogo Kawada, a co-founder of DeNA and an angel investor, has also joined the team.

Currently Japan’s crowdsourcing platforms can be roughly divided into two types. One type has all processes completed within the platform – such as with Lancers and Crowdworks. The other type has the company more actively involved in the process, as with Mugenup or Kaizen. Viibar’s position is closer to the latter.

We spoke to Kamisaka about how the company handles video production.

ーーThe process is usually so complicated that it would be difficult leaving everything up to just the client and the creator. Mugenup solved the problem by dividing a whole process into small parts. How will Viibar take on the problem?

First, we ask clients to present an outline of the video. After signing a non-disclosure agreement, video directors on our platform who are interested in joining the project participate in the assignment and pitch their work. After creators are selected, we build a production platform on cloud.

On the website, clients can see profiles and past work of video directors and select one based on that information.

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ーーIsn’t it difficult to work on a project when there is just direct communication between a client and a creator?

Right. So we also have product managers who help facilitate the process. A client’s expectation of quality is usually pretty high, and sometimes the creator has to do some processes again. By as we learn with every project, that will be reflected in our operations and systems.

ーーHow many members do you have on the team?

We have three part-time product managers. We expect one manager can support 10 to 20 clients.

The video market is growing fast, as YouTube’s business expands. There is great potential for Viibar to grow.

ーーWhat type of order do you get the most? And how much does it usually cost?

For animation videos, around 300,000 yen ($3000), and for live-action video, 600,000 yen ($6000) would be the most common price. The types of video are wide-rangng, but YouTube ads and short video ads for companies’ websites that introduce their product or service are increasing.

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Videomaking has typically been a high-cost service. But with more video consumtion online, the need for affordable video clips is going up. On my own personal project dropout, almost 90 percent of the users watch the videos on their smartphone. This device shift is significant.

If it costs a few thousands dollars to make a video, it won’t be affordable for most people. But what if that price drops to a few hundreds dollars? Then it could drive an expansion of quality video media. To that end, I think there’s much potential to be found in video-crowdsourcing.