MailOnline guarantees brands ‘one million views’ for each video in new sponsored player
MailOnline has launched a new sponsored video player that will sit within its sidebar feed, offering brands a prime time slot to reach the Mail’s huge online audience, with targeting capabilities in the pipeline.
MailOnline's new video ad format appears within the sidebar
The publisher’s production team will create sponsored video content for brands to sit within the new unit in the sidebar, which will appear across all MailOnline pages.
The publisher reaches 217m monthly unique browsers according to December ABCs - the most read online newspaper. As such, it is guaranteeing brands one million views for each video.
It will only charge clients for views of more than 10 seconds, at the cost of £0.09 per view. Video production is included in this cost, while clients are also able to keep the video and use it on their own channels, the publisher said.
The video content will autoplay in full view and the player can be clicked, either to expand to fullscreen or to lead back to a landing page of the advertiser's choice. As an exclusive slot, advertisers will not be able to buy it in conjunction with other display or native campaigns.
The slot, called Branded Video, will only be available via direct sell, although programmatic has not been ruled out.
When asked if the Mail has ambitions to make the slot targeted to consumers' interests, Anne Shooter, commercial editor at Mail Advertising, responded: “This continues to be a product in development. As we have seen with launch on mobile and tablet, we can now target written sponsored content when we ad serve it and greater targeting is in the roadmap for this branded video product.”
The platform is now live on desktop with mobile and tablet ready to launch.
"There is huge video demand in market and growth in video consumption of the MailOnline audience. Developing a stand out product in market has taken time, but we are confident we now have the right product and the right buying metric," Shooter said.
It comes at a tricky time for the publisher, currently one of the targets of a Stop Funding Hate campaign that is pressuring brands to stop all advertising on it for its part in promoting “hatred, discrimination and demonisation”, the campaign claims. As a result, Lego has said it will not renew its contract with the publisher.
What’s more, last week the publisher was removed from Wikipedia after the free information platform branded it a "generally unreliable" source of news, raising questions as to its position as a purveyor of factual information.