Yahoo Prime View Enables 100% Viewability on Display Ads

Yahoo has rolled out Prime View, a new vCPM (viewable cost per thousand) product that is hoped to give brands the ability to run display ad campaigns at a 100 percent viewability rate.

In a blog post, Yahoo says Prime View’s viewable impression methodology is based on the new Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation that is aligned with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) standard for display ad viewability measurement.

With the Prime View vCPM product, advertisers can get more exposure for their ads without changes to workflow, reporting, or creative, Yahoo says.

“We know that advertisers want to be confident their message is reaching consumers, so Yahoo’s vCPM offering assures advertisers only pay for viewable impressions and helps increase campaign performance,” writes Yahoo senior vice president of advertising technology Scott Burke in the post.

In order to achieve 100 percent viewability, Yahoo is using the IAB’s SafeFrame, a managed API-enabled iframe. This opens a line of communication between publisher page content and iframe-contained external content like ads. David Gunzerath, senior vice president and associate director of the MRC, says that Yahoo “has a very safe environment that’s limited to its own properties and can control all the aspects that go into the viewability determination.”

According to Gunzerath, one of the big historical impediments to viewability measurements has been the inability to measure within certain iframe environments, but SafeFrame marks an advance.

“We congratulate Yahoo for achieving accreditation,” Gunzerath says. “In fact, it’s something of a milestone because Yahoo’s viewability solution is the first we’ve accredited that uses the IAB SafeFrame protocol, so we think this is an important step in advancing the state of viewability measurements.”

According to a whitepaper from programmatic marketing software company DataXu, vCPM compares cost per viewable impression across partners with different in-view rates and is equal to CPM divided by in-view rate.

The challenge with viewability is that it doesn’t take into account the cost of being on a higher viewability site and that’s where vCPM comes in, says Shane Keats, a senior director at DataXu. In some cases, the publisher with the lower in-view rate might be a more cost-effective way of getting viewable impressions, he adds.

“We applaud Yahoo for working with viewability as a currency. We think it’s great,” Keats says. “The key for advertisers is to think through cost-effectiveness and to think through viewability as a relative metric, not an absolute metric.”

Yahoo Prime View is available for display ads on Yahoo in the U.S. The platform says it plans to extend the offering across the Yahoo global network, but did not provide a timeline.

Yahoo says it is the largest publisher to offer a viewable impressions tool using a methodology accredited by the MRC.

According to Gunzerath, the only other publisher the MRC has accredited for display ad viewability is Glam Media, which gained its accreditation in March. With the launch of Prime View, Yahoo becomes the 13th company to become accredited for display advertising by the MRC overall.

In addition, Gunzerath says he knows of “at least one” additional publisher using the SafeFrame app that is in the process of being audited and he expects others to follow suit.

As ClickZ previously reported, the MRC lifted its Viewable Impression Advisory for display advertising in March. In addition, in collaboration with the IAB, it released guidelines defining viewability, including measurements such as 50 percent of an ad’s pixels must be viewable for a minimum of one second.