Welcome to our latest round of Six Questions, an occasional series where we ask our Technology Partners how they can help the enterprise WordPress community beat growth goals, iterate quickly, and have fun doing it.

What does success look like for your customers?

Our mission is to put a relevant video in every article, tell trusted news to a billion people and to repatriate advertising dollars from that video back to publishers and broadcasters. A happy Oovvuu customer is a reader who gets a better news experience with video. And that makes for a happy publisher who has video and earnings they did not have before.

We want to see happy content creators who make more money from distributing their video to the world and delighted advertisers who see that video from news publishers outperforms on every engagement metric.

How do you help your customers accelerate their growth?

With love and attention. Publishing has a reputation for complexity but it’s actually simple. A billion people read news articles every day yet less than 1% of online articles feature video.

Publishers have the audience, but lack the video content to satisfy this massive audience need. Broadcasters have the video the publishers need, but until now they have lacked the capability to get it to the audiences that want it. And advertisers are looking for engaged audiences and publishers they can trust at scale.

Oovvuu brings these all together. We are the recipe that combines the ingredients.

What does a great customer look like to your company?

There is no one size fits all. We love all our customers equally. Some need our help and we are delighted to do it. Some are very advanced and want to optimise and we learn from each other. ​

We have more than 400 customers now, and I know them all personally. That means a lot to me. They know they can talk to me and I can talk to them. 

What challenges do your customers face?

They are under attack for doing something the world needs now more than ever. Access to reporting about world events during a global pandemic is about as critical a human need as it is possible to imagine, yet media companies are being suffocated out of existence by the monopolistic powers of some of the big technology companies.

Don’t know about you, but for me, I don’t want Google and Facebook to decide what news I can access.

I live in Australia, and earlier this year, they both turned off public access to news sites because media companies here had the temerity to question their business model.

That meant parents with sick children were unable to access Government websites and official information about Covid. Sites for domestic violence went dark in an instant and without warning.

That cannot be allowed to happen in a democracy. And when the duopoly are challenged — for example, in the case of Cambridge Analytica — that comes from the media, which exists to provide checks and balances on unconstricted power.

What trends are you seeing in the market?

Great question. Media has been in free fall for the same decade that the duopoly have been in helter skelter unchecked growth. These things are connected.

But in Q1 last year, when Covid arrived, and when US regulators first said they were considering anti-trust action against the duopoly, a dam was broken. First it was a trickle, then a stream and now more and more advertising and advertisers are shifting budgets from the duopoly — and critically, doing it on purpose and with the intent of supporting the media.

I believe the media industry bounced a year ago and is on a growth curve again. Expect to see some recovery there over the coming year.

How has your team adapted to working remotely?

Well, they have hit the road. We’re based in Sydney, but they have gone to Miami, New Zealand, India. I think it’s wonderful!

I’d love to load up my Mac into a camper van and head on a surf trip up the coast, but my wife and three kids aren’t going to react kindly to that.

Delighted though that some of the rest of the team have taken the opportunity to spread their wings.

Want to know more about WordPress VIP Technology Partners and the enterprise WordPress ecosystem? Check out the full roster of partners, and get in touch with us today.