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Overlay.TV is expanding and so is our team. We are currently looking for a talented Flash developer with experience developing interactive user interfaces using object-oriented ActionScript. The ideal candidate has experience creating or using UI frameworks, delivering video using Flash, working with the camera and mic, publishing live video to media servers, integrating with web services, working with CDN’s, handling cross-domain issues and using various skinning techniques.

A solid grasp of object-oriented programming, unit testing, debuggers, source control systems, build management, HTTP and web development, code profiling and performance tuning is expected.

The candidate will be passionate about creating robust designs that perform well, look great and are easy to use. He or she should also be comfortable working in a small team, collaborating and presenting ideas.

Required Skills

Flash AS3

AJAX, JSON, XHTML, JavaScript

XML, Regular expressions, text manipulation

Photoshop, Illustrator

Desired Skills

Flash Media Server or Red5

Experience specifically building AS3 video players

Adobe Flex

Ruby-on-Rails

Contact Information:

 If you think this sounds like the perfect job for you please contact us at careers@overlay.tv.

Just read an interesting article on AdAge today, which talks about a sharp decline in percentage of users who click on online display ads. Couple this with recent numbers of online ad spend decline and you’ve got yourself a pretty scary picture of the state of content monetization. But is it really?

Semi, or unrelated display ads, are not like other links on the page. They usually bring no utility or immediate value to users; more like “content high jacking” than “content monetization”. It’s no surprise then that people are fed up with this noise. We do still click on things  - to get to more relevant content - so click-through is not dead, just getting smarter.

I think it’s got something to do with the packaging. When we visit web pages we very easily separate between “content” and “noise”.  The former is what we came in for, while the latter is what we have to put up with because we are not willing to pay for the real content. We’re obviously less likely to click on the “noise” which drives its price down, making it even more difficult for good content providers to survive. It’s not the underlying content though, it’s the ineffective way of associating the message with a call-for-action.

One of the main reasons for this, I believe, is the lack of relevance due to weak contextual association. In order to have an effective “participation” from viewers, one has to bring closer the enabler (primary content) and the CFA or ad (secondary content). There are two dimensions to this. The first one is space: if it’s relevant to the content then couple it with the content, don’t just throw it into the same container (page) and expect the two messages to stick. The second is time: most content is fundamentally linear (text you read through, video you watch though, or audio you listen to) and comprises of lots of smaller pieces of information (a sentence, a frame in a video or segment of audio). It is those pieces, rather than the big piece, that could be monetized, just like hypertext links to relevant/contextual content are being followed.

The ultimate goal is to personalize this, to get the right message delivered to the right person at the right time in the right context. Lots of progress is being made towards these goals by my company (Overlay.TV) and others.

Click-through is not dead, it’s just getting smarter.

[Orginally posted at  http://kishkush.com/2009/10/01/is-click-through-really-dead/]