Ebook: How Oovvuu grew its video platform to over 400 million streams per day

There aren’t many stable careers in media anymore, but by 2014, Ricky Sutton had worked his way up the executive ranks to a point where he was pretty much guaranteed a cushy salary and steady employment for the rest of his life. He got his start in the early 90s as a newspaper journalist in the UK, and over a period of about a decade had managed to leapfrog from covering local news to serving as a war correspondent to holding senior level positions at major media companies.

By 2009, Sutton was running the video division of Fairfax Media, which at the time was one of the largest newspaper holding companies in Australia. He’d reached the upper echelons of the media industry, but then he decided to throw all that away so he could co-launch a bootstrapped startup that paid him absolutely nothing in salary. “That was the least likely career path for someone in my position to take,” he told me. “It would've been so much easier just to stay in the job and earn the salary. But I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't be part of the decline. I had to be part of something else.”

That “decline” Sutton spoke of was that of traditional media. Working on the digital side of these mainstream publications, he’d watched as they struggled to monetize their online audiences, mainly because they were stuck with low-performing display ads as their sole revenue source. Meanwhile, large tech platforms like Google and Facebook were siphoning off a larger and larger share of the advertising market, partly because they controlled the levers of distribution.

As the head of video at Fairfax Media, Sutton knew that video inventory was more valued by advertisers and could be sold at much higher rates. But the problem, as he saw it, was that most publishers weren’t optimized for producing video at scale, and what little they did produce was often uploaded to Facebook and YouTube, the very platforms that had cornered the ad market.

So what was his solution? In 2014, Sutton and two other co-founders — Greg Moore and Ross McCreath — launched Oovvuu, a distribution platform that allowed text-based publishers to embed high-quality video from broadcasters like the BBC. While the going was slow at first — Sutton had to sell his house and went years without a salary — Oovvuu eventually scaled to hundreds of publishers and over 400 million video streams a day. Its stated mission is to “put a relevant video in every article, tell trusted news to a billion people, and repatriate $20B from the tech duopoly back to publishers and broadcasters,” and it claims to increase a single article’s monetization potential by a factor of 16.

So how did a startup with virtually no resources take on some of the largest tech behemoths in the world? For this ebook, Sutton walked me through the company’s early days and explained how, publisher by publisher, he slowly convinced an entire industry to band together against a common foe.