Nimbus Case Study: Kidoodle
“We have seen significant lift — 23% in overall revenue — after integrating Nimbus. We are getting so many new channels of demand, that we’ve been able to fill our inventory at market rates.” — Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy, Kidoodle
Kidoodle is a family-focused video streaming service. Their team hand-picks all content for Kidoodle.TV to ensure every show is age-appropriate and represents the very best in educational, entertaining, and inspiring stories for their young audience. Their commitment to safe streaming has awarded them certification by the kidSAFE Seal Program. Safe Exchange is the adtech arm of Kidoodle that manages its real-time ad review to ensure creatives are appropriate for their audience.
Challenge
The wild-west nature of the open market ecosystem had historically posed significant challenges for Kidoodle. They did not want to sacrifice child safety when expanding into programmatic, and had settled on a majority of their revenue coming from direct sales or PMPs.
“Ensuring that all the ads coming in are safe and compliant is the challenge. There’s a definite need to review in real-time. Because of this, we have lots of publishers on our platform who have only monetized through direct deals or didn’t monetize at all. It’s a huge opportunity for revenue that was missing.”
— Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy
Solution
Nimbus provided Kidoodle with both technical and operational solutions. Nimbus engineered a custom server-to-server integration that works with Safe Exchange and allowed Kidoodle to apply their realtime creative review process to the open marketplace.
“Nimbus stepped in as a great partner. Safe Exchange is a pretty unique setup among other players and platforms in the space, and it was all still really new. It was fun working with Nimbus to build and develop tools that were originally a bit opaque — to take on new challenges. Nimbus’ ability to quickly develop new feature sets as needs arise has been the differentiator for us.”
— Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy
Nimbus also guided Kidoodle in selecting demand partnerships that would work, made the right introductions, and facilitated those conversations to get kid-safe, COPPA compliant demand on board.
“Even more so than just being the pipes, the team at Nimbus has been really helpful in getting conversations going with partners in the Nimbus platform to optimize and grow our integrations. These are partners we would be unable to connect with on our own, given our situation and resources.”
— Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy
Results
With Nimbus, Kidoodle has successfully monetized via open marketplace programmatic — an opportunity they have never had in the past — and completely transformed their revenue.
“We have seen significant lift — 23% in overall revenue — after integrating Nimbus. The biggest success has probably been our fill rate. We are getting so many new channels of demand through Nimbus that we’ve been able to fill our inventory at market rates. This is much more than we were able to before.”
— Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy
Nimbus’ ability to integrate with Safe Exchange and proactively work toward eliminating bad ads has also been a huge success, and Kidoodle has been able to grow revenue without risking their user experience.
“Nimbus has done some great work to help us maintain the highest ad quality possible. Even when ads we don’t want come through, our own creative review catches things that aren’t appropriate for our unique audience. In general, it’s a pretty clean experience in terms of the ads that we get.”
— Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy
This has included both technical solutions as well as Nimbus’ publisher-first expertise — guiding Kidoodle to leverage oRTB and effectively work with their demand partners to minimize unwanted ads.
“In general, there are a lot of partners in the programmatic space that aren’t comfortable working with a COPPA publisher. Nimbus was really helpful in getting us the best partners. On top of that, we worked with KidSafe and the Nimbus team to make sure all of the parameters and signals in our oRTB requests were both providing the protections we wanted for our audience, as well as optimizing for the most demand possible and maximizing our monetization.”
— Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy
When asked if Kidoodle would recommend Nimbus to another OTT publisher, Gabe praises the Nimbus team’s responsiveness and ability to get things done.
“Compared to some of the other partners we vetted, we liked how quickly and eager Nimbus was in getting things done and ensuring it’s going to be the best setup. Very rapid response, that was a real value in what we’ve seen.”
— Gabe, Vice President of Product Strategy