Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Veoh founder Dmitry Shapiro is stepping aside for newly named CEO Steve Mitgang, who formerly was senior vice president of Yahoo's (YHOO) advertising platform.

A la Bill Gates, Shapiro will now be in the role of chief innovation officer for the video company.

What this represents is the shift toward monetization of online video. As Mitgang said in a telephone interview: "For Veoh, it's symbolic in that we are transitioning unprecedented growth around a great product experience into ... a great business."

The obvious choice at this time for a CEO is someone with the background - and probably more important - the connections of someone like Mitgang.

This is a good move because there isn't going to be a lot of ability to differentiate from other video-sharing companies in today's climate. The best way to do it is to build a business model that works. Monetization may be the best differentiator there is at this time, assuming all other things are pretty equal, which it seems they are.

Dmitry Shapiro

With online video viewing continuing to grow, Veoh has grown along with it. The company says it has 14.3 million unique users in June, an increase of almost 10 million over that experienced in February.

While Veoh has some strong financing - and is about to close another round of financing this week - there will be a growing pressure to start to make money. It's at the stage where it needs to show its investors it can deliver the goods. Don't think the hiring of Mitgang was because Shapiro wanting to fade into the background. He hasn't been around long enough to get tired.

This a message from investors to step things up and start to build a business around their products. The third round of financing probably included some remarks and demands directed toward that issue.

While people keep on saying what will or will not be accepted by users concerning ads, many are being far too shy about experimenting and trying different ways to monetize and offer ads. This is the time of experimentation.

A long time ago Steve Jobs said, "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

I think that's where online video advertising is at now. While it may sound outrageous to some, I think we need to just throw a bunch of stuff out there now. If anybody asks a consumer if they want to watch an ad, the response will always be no. Even if we offer different variations they can interact with, unless they see it they're not going to know what they want.

One way or the other it's going to have to happen. Investors aren't going to let happen what happened in the last dot com bomb. They're going to start demanding that online video start to show it can make money. To do that things have to be tried.

I would quit listening to all this people talking about the sensitivity of the viewers to ads in any way. We need to just start throwing things out there to different demographics and see how they respond.

As I said here, there will probably end up being a number of different ways viewers desire to watch commercials with their video. Behavioral-targeting is one way to reach them, as people will want to watch them rather than avoid them altogether.

It seems to me, like Jobs said, people really don't know what they want until they see it. We need to show them something so they can decide. Trying different things is the only way we're going to find out.