Viewers more tolerant of video ads than slow-loading videos
Ads that play within long-form content such as TV episodes and movies are more likely to be watched in full (87 per cent) than those that play in short-form content such as news clips and sports highlights (67 per cent), research from Akamai Technologies has found.
The research, Understanding the Effectiveness of Video Ads: A Measurement Study, was co-authored by S. S. Krishnan and R.K. Sitaraman, and will be presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Barcelona on Thursday, 24 October 2013.
It was discovered that viewers are more tolerant of video ads than of slow-loading videos, with those who must wait 10 seconds for their video to load three times more likely to abandon than users who spend the same amount time watching a pre-roll ad.
The position of an ad in the video has the single largest impact on completion rate, with a mid-roll ad 18.1 per cent more likely to be completed than the same ad as a pre-roll, and pre-rolls 14.3 per cent more likely to be completed than the same ad as a post-roll.
“This study is unique in that it goes above and beyond tracking and comparing completion rates, and rather takes an in-depth look at when viewers complete watching video ads and when they abandon them,” said Sitaraman. “By using novel scientific techniques for extracting knowledge from huge amounts of anonymised viewer data, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of video ads that are key to the monetization economics of online videos.”
It was found that those who do leave ads will do so early: one-third of the abandoners leave at or before the quarter-way mark and two-thirds at or before the halfway mark in the ad; while repeat visitors to a website have higher completion rates for ads.
The Akamai research also noted that time of day and day of week do not affect ad completion rates substantially.
The study analysed in aggregate 367 million videos and 257 million ads from over 3,000 publishers that were viewed by 65 million unique users worldwide.