This year EX.CO didn't just talk about what video can do. It brought the proof onstage. Ruth Manielevitch, VP International Revenue at EX.CO, sat down with Bharat K Pattem, Senior Manager, Ad Monetization at Glance, for a masterclass on how Glance built a video business from scratch.
Glance, part of the InMobi Group, is the world's first intelligent shopping agent that lives right on smart lock screens. It learns each user's style, spots trends and delivers a personalized feed of news, content and commerce to hundreds of millions of users.
That scale is what made the story worth telling. In under a year, Glance took video from an experiment to a 7-figure annualized run rate. Here's how, and what the team learned along the way.
Video is an experience play before it's a revenue play
Glance's display business was already working. Video was a chance to give users a richer content experience and to diversify revenue, not just add another ad format. As Pattem put it on stage: “Video revenue is our lagging metric. We wanted to start with best-in-class video content.”
The timing was right, but the starting point was a challenge. Glance had no video library of its own, so how do you go about implementing a new video experience that could fit naturally into a text-heavy, mobile-first product without compromising existing revenue pipes?
You let video earn its place on the page
At Glance's scale, a few things had to be true at once:
- Feel native. Video had to fit the existing experience without disrupting it.
- Stay relevant. Every video had to match the article beside it, from lifestyle to sports to breaking news.
- Perform. Fast load times, high viewability and strong completion.
- Scale without manual work. A lean team couldn't take on new editorial or ops overhead.
That's where EX.CO came in, supplying the player, the premium content and the real-time yield optimization Glance didn't have. (The full setup is in our Glance case study.)
From controlled test to full rollout
Glance started with a controlled test, and the early numbers beat expectations: completion rates reached 85–90% for content and about 95% for video ads. “It was the right video content the user wants at that point in time,” Pattem said. “That gave us the conviction to scale.”
From there, the teams ran round after round of testing and optimization rather than treating the first setup as final. Once the experience and performance were proven, Glance expanded the player footprint, growing player loads 540% by month 11.
New revenue doesn't have to compromise existing revenue
Protecting the display revenue Glance already earned was a priority from day one. Before scaling, the teams agreed on what success looked like and tracked it together: user experience, completion, viewability, yield and revenue. They fine-tuned how video worked alongside the display stack, including backfill, so it added revenue instead of cannibalizing it. The result: Glance never had to choose between its core business and a new opportunity.
The scale surprised even Glance. “When we started exploring video, we didn't think it could become this big,” Pattem said. “Now video is a key part of our planning every year.”
For publishers and platforms weighing their own move into video, that's the playbook: test in a controlled way, measure what matters, optimize continuously, and work with a partner who stays close as you grow.
Ready to build your own video revenue line? Talk to EX.CO