When we started Ooyala, one of our goals was to create a smarter and less intrusive form of advertising for broadcast-quality television. We thought that online viewers wouldn't sit through untargeted and irrelevant advertising. When we were first pitching venture capitalists, I used to say that our technology would make it so I would never have to sit through another Tampax ad. 

Premium content, such as original investigative reporting, is expensive to create and can’t always be paid for by advertising alone. For many media publishers, the answer is to charge consumers for access to some or all of their content. But not all paywalls are created equal. Some “dumb” paywalls stubbornly charge a fixed fee at a fixed time with no thought given to maximizing revenue. Needless to say, Ooyala prefers a smarter alternative. Publishers should ask three questions when building a paywall: 1) What content should be covered?