Fazny Zavahir: Captchas + Ads = NuCaptcha Engage

NuCaptcha, the recently launched video captcha technology, is rolling out a new offering tonight: NuCaptcha Engage. Like the startup’s previous product, the platform uses video to determine if people are really human but adds a twist in the form of brand advertising.

Captchas are security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human or a spambot. Most Captchas you see are transcription, text-based Captchas. NuCaptcha is trying to disrupt the space by adding video to the mix.

NuCaptcha Engage allows brands to place advertisements behind the actual Captcha text. NuCaptcha’s video animation technology aims to be easier to read and more secure, with animation that makes the captcha far easier for humans to solve. You can find examples of the technology here.

NuCaptcha’s formats are available in a variety of sizes and will soon be incorporated on the advertiser side by brands such as Electronic Arts, Activision, Disney and Wrigley. Pricing is either on a video CPM basis ($10 to $25), or a cost-per-engagement basis ($0.10 to $1.00), for larger, longer videos.

In tests, NuCaptcha’s adds have experienced 100 percent higher user engagement than traditional online advertisements. NuCaptcha’s pitch is that Captchas are used massively across the web (over 100 billion
captchas were used last year alone) and it makes sense to eek out some revenue from this traffic in the form of advertising. On the publisher side, captchas are promised to be more engaging compared to the average text formats.

It should be interesting to see if NuCaptcha’s advertisement formats will take off. Since NuCaptcha’s launch in June, the startup is now used by over 3,500 websites. In September, five millon captchas were served using the platform, and the startup is on schedule to serve ten million in October.

Fazny Zavahir: Security Company Strengthens CAPTCHAs With Video

A security company called NuCaptcha is incorporating advertising into a video CAPTCHA system that is much harder for computers to break.

CATPCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” It was developed to thwart Web annoyances such as spam and false account registrations, among others. It uses a box of jumbled letters that humans must decode to allow, for example, a registration to proceed.

When CAPTCHAs were first introduced, it was difficult for optical character recognition (OCR) technologies to break them. Over the last few years, that has changed, and CAPTCHAs are much less effective.

In order to halt automated CAPTCHA solving programs, the puzzles have been made more difficult to solve, so much so that many are nearly unreadable to humans as well.

“The bottom line is that the static image CAPTCHA technology that dominates the Web today is simply maxed out,” said Michel Giasson, CEO and founder of NuCaptcha.

NuCaptcha does CAPTCHAs but with a twist: rather than a static box of text the system runs the text as a streaming banner within a video. The movement of the text throws off automated CAPTCHA-solving software. The text also does not have to be obscured as much, making it much easier for people to read and likely to keep users on the website.

Greg Mori, an associate professor at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, has reviewed NuCaptcha. He wrote in a three-page review that he was so impressed with the product he joined NuCaptcha’s advisory board.

Humans “innately decode motion all the time,” Mori wrote in his endorsement. “By animating the positions of letters in a NuCaptcha, it is simultaneously easier for humans and more difficult for software. It becomes more difficult for software to segment because NuCaptcha can pack the letters closer together with significant overlap. This commingling of letters is very difficult for software to segment.”

NuCaptcha hasn’t been immune to attacks, said Christopher Bailey, the company’s CTO and founder. But it has built-in defense mechanisms.

NuCaptcha has a back-end behavioral intelligence system that records how a user — or possibly a software program — is interacting with the CAPTCHA. If it appears the website is being abused, such as when 1,000 CAPTCHAs are solved in rapid succession, the text that needs to be read can be speeded up, the letters can be blended closer together, different fonts can inserted, and the color of the text can be modified, among other techniques, Bailey said.

Human errors in reading CAPTCHAS tend to be more consistent, such as when a person types a letter on a keyboard that was right next to the correct letter, Bailey said. Automated CAPTCHA readers don’t do that, he said.

NuCaptcha released a free product in June that allowed websites to use it for less than 25,000 CAPTCHAs per month. The system is being used on about 3,500 Web sites, Bailey said. A NuCaptcha plugin is available for the WordPress blogging service.

On Monday, the company rolled out a product called NuCaptcha Engage, which incorporates the CAPTCHA with video advertising.

In one example, an advertisement for Wrigley’s Doublemint gum shows the brand’s slogan flowing from right to left. The CAPTCHA could be configured so that the website visitor would need to, for example, type the slogan or part of the slogan in order to continue.

Advertisers could be charged between US$10 to $25 per thousand views of the video NuCaptcha. Another option is a cost-per-action model, where an advertiser pays every time a user performs some sort of action, such as typing a slogan. NuCaptcha is proposing to split advertising revenue with publishers 50/50. The first advertisements will go live on Tuesday featuring companies including Electronic Arts, Activision, THQ and Wrigley.

“The mission is to help publishers earn maximum revenue,” Giasson said.