A recent survey conducted by Brightcove and Streaming Media revealed compelling data about the lag in monetizing video:
- Only 16% of respondents said their companies are monetizing more than 50% of their mobile video
- Over two-thirds of respondents (68%) said that they are monetizing under 10% of the content that they are delivering to mobile devices
Brightcove customers invest heavily in their video businesses – creating and licensing content, developing websites and apps to showcase that content and marketing their great brands. Therefore it’s critical that the ads in “ad supported” businesses are able to run and produce revenue as intended.
With video ad monetization in mobile environments being more challenging than delivering those same ads on desktop, and the source of many customer questions, we at Brightcove thought it worthwhile to host a short webinar on ways to embrace best practices and avoid pitfalls in mobile video monetization. We hope you can join us!
Further emphasizing this pain point, influential media and tech website The Information touched on the challenge in a piece called “Technical Glitches Cost Media Firms in Lost Video Ads.” Reporter Tom Dotan noted that friction may arise from the way in which publishers set up their workflow with their ad servers or traffic rich media ads:
The roots of the problem run deep into the infrastructure behind how video ads are transmitted. It specifically occurs when unsold video ad space is auctioned by ad services—firms such as Google’s DoubleClick, Facebook’s LiveRail or independent firms like OpenX. In those situations, in the milliseconds after a person has clicked on a video, the ad space is auctioned and the winning bidder’s ad is shown to the person.
But if the bidding and service process takes too long—typically more than 500 milliseconds—the video player is designed to skip over the pre-roll ad and go directly to the main video. Media firms choose this timing believing that it’s better to have a video load without an ad than have a person get frustrated by a slow loading video.
But lengthy delays are occurring more than expected, usually because of a sluggish connection between the third party ad server and the advertisers. It’s particularly bad in mobile, where the lag times from ad servers can be worsened by problems like bad cell connections and the length of time it takes for a server to determine the type of device it’s sending to. This compounds existing difficulties on mobile, such as video ads that are created in Flash and incompatible with most mobile video players.
You can read Tom’s full article here (subscription required) and please join us for a discussion of these topics at our webinar on March 24th at 2PM ET. Register here.