Longer Online Videos Beg for New Ad Strategy

Consumers are not only watching more online video, they're staying glued to the screen for longer, leading to new opportunities for advertisers. To exploit this trend, marketers and publishers should rethink their ad strategies, according to Ooyala.

Consumers are not only watching more online video, they’re staying glued to the screen for longer, leading to new opportunities for advertisers. To exploit this trend, marketers and publishers should rethink their ad strategies, according to Ooyala.

The video streaming and monetization platform provider for broadcasters, service providers and operators today released its Q3 2012 Global Video Index, with data collected through its video analytics platform.

Ooyala found a significant increase in live and long-form video content viewing across devices quarter-over-quarter. Tablets were the big video story, with the overall share of tablet video viewing almost doubling in the past two quarters.

The increase maps to the increased penetration of the iPad. Ooyala found that after the new iPad was released in March 2012, tablet viewing jumped 26 percent. Since then, the overall share of tablet video viewing has grown 90 percent.

At the same time, the overall share of mobile video viewing grew 39 percent in the second and third quarters of this year, with the combined video viewing time on tablets and other mobile devices increasing by 64 percent.

This is good news for advertisers, because tablet owners spend more than other mobile site visitors. Also, the IAB has found that 47 percent of tablet users engage with an ad more than once a week.

Ooyala found 30 percent higher engagement for the same mid-roll ads on tablets and mobile phones than for PCs, and it attributed this to the fact that most people watch the videos in full-screen mode.

Ooyala also found an increase in long-form video viewing across devices, again with tablet owners leading the pack, spending 71 percent of their total video viewing time watching videos 10 minutes long or longer. Moreover, 30 percent of total tablet viewing time was spent watching content that was more than an hour long.

Does more viewing time mean more ads? Absolutely.

“On average, we’ve found that videos that are over five minutes long can support two times the ad loads per minute than shorter clips. And videos that are longer than 10 minutes can usually drive three times the number of ads per minute than shorter clips, because people settle into passive consumption,” said Bismarck Lepe, president of products for Ooyala.

Gaming consoles became a preferred device for watching live video; the amount of time spent watching live video on gaming consoles more than doubled in Q3, while desktop viewers tuned into live video for an average of 40 minutes per play.

Ooyala has found that consumers treat their consoles like television programming, so even higher ad loads are appropriate; as many as one 30-second spot per minute of content is acceptable, the company said. However, most publishers have not started to include this level of advertising.

For the Global Video Index, Ooyala measures the anonymized viewing habits of some 200 million viewers in 130 countries each month, based on its processing billions of video analytics events each day.

Lepe said that this shift in online video viewing demands new advertising strategies. On the Ooyala platform, five-second pre-roll ads have only 10 percent the abandonment rate of 30-second pre-rolls. In order to optimize revenue, he said, “Five-second pre-rolls and two mid-roll 40- to 80-second ad segments help maximize revenue.”

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