The Best Way To Increase Advertising Load For Broadband Video

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"Further, Albert said that there's plenty of room for improving online's economics. One key focus is increasing the ad load, possibly to as much as double the current 5 ads per program. ABC.com has experimented with this and its research shows that neither the viewer nor the advertiser experience is diminished. As a result, ABC is inclined to increase the ad load to continue improving online economics further, but is somewhat constrained by advertisers' desire to minimize clutter and their own desire to remain consistent with non-ABC sites' ad loads."

There are two main choices for increasing the advertising load in a broadband video.  First, the publisher could serve back-to-back ads in the existing advertising breaks.  Or, the publisher could define new advertising breaks that occur more frequently in the video and only serve one ad per break. 

On TV, viewers are used to 2-3 minute ad breaks with multiple ads per ad block every 7-8 minutes.  As we wrote about in our whitepaper, Content is King, But Metadata Rules, translating this to the web has some challenges.  The broadband viewer has a shorter attention span, with many more available choices.  There is also an expectation of an ad countdown timer in broadband that does not exist on TV.  If you saw "Your show will continue in 1:30..." while watching your favorite web video because of multiple ads, aren't you more likely to switch to an IM window, check out Twitter, Facebook or some other site? 

Instead of showing two ads per break every 8 minutes, publishers could show a single ad every 4 minutes.  For the viewer, they get back to the content more quickly.  For the advertiser, they are not bundled with other ads so ad recall should be greater.  For the publisher, the viewer is more likely to stay on their site watching video - driving user engagement and session time.  The graphic below taken from our whitepaper shows this transformation in advertising inventory.

The challenge then becomes - when can an advertisement be called with the least impact to the viewing experience?  Where are there logical insertion points that do not interrupt dialog or disrupt the flow of the current scene of the video?  How can these points be identified quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively?

This is precisely what the Gotuit Video Metadata Management System does.  Our metadata defines each logical scene within the original source video, with the ability to serve ads at those boundaries.  Publishers now have more monetization options and controls.  No longer limited to the original ad breaks, they can serve an ad (or multiple ads) after a specified number of scenes watched, or after a specific duration of video watched.  The more precise ad insertion points and larger advertising inventory give publishers the ability to optimize their user experience with their content monetization goals. 

So, is it better to show multiple ads per block, or have more advertising insertion points in the content?  The good news is we support both and make it easy for publishers to try different approaches to see what is best for their content and audience.

Learn more about how Gotuit's metadata can unleash your video's full potential.

Download this free whitepaper.