Case Study: Complex Media boosts video CTRs and pre-roll revenue with AYLIEN's Text Analysis API

How Complex Media increased pre-roll CTRs on video ads using semantic advertising and content tagging

Complex, a New York–based youth culture media platform reaching over 120 million unique users per month, needed to scale and automate contextual video insertion and ad targeting across tens of thousands of pages daily. They had relied on a manual keyword workflow that was unreliable for serving content-relevant pre-roll ads, so Complex turned to AYLIEN and its Text Analysis API—specifically the Concept Extraction and Classification endpoints—to extract entities and categorize articles for automated, contextual ad placement.

AYLIEN’s solution extracts and disambiguates named entities (linked to DBpedia) and classifies content using the IAB QAG taxonomy, feeding those concepts and categories into Complex’s video insertion widget and ad recommendation engine. The result: faster, automated tagging (up & running in two days), notably higher video click-through rates and increased pre-roll revenue for Complex, with AYLIEN’s extraction accuracy cited as a key reason for the improvement.

Complex

Ronit Shaham

Complex