Ozone Project proves longer ad attention on news sites due to slower scroll speeds
A new advertising study has quantified the relationship between the quality of publisher content and dwell time on accompanying ads, unearthing a clear correlation between the two.
Ozone Project proves longer ad attention on news sites due to slower scroll speeds
Commissioned by rapidly expanding digital advertising platform The Ozone Project and attention technology company Lumen Research, the report found that premium content boosted attention to display advertising across Ozone’s suite of websites versus the web in general.
When video advertising was looked at the impact was even more striking, with video ads across Ozone’s estate attracting 111% more attention than equivalent formats elsewhere on the internet, as well as drawing 140% more attention than social media video ads.
Drilling down into why this might be so, Ozone attributes three key factors behind the relationship, centered on slower scroll speeds associated with dense content that carries knock-on benefits for advertisers. Ozone calculates an average scroll speed of 55 pixels per second for its sites, versus 63 for competing sites and 79 for social feeds.
This is reinforced by the fact that larger ads typically grab more attention than their smaller brethren, placing desktop displays at a significant advantage over social platforms.
Finally, a focus on quality over quantity means there are fewer ads vying for limited attention, ideally with just one ad displayed at any given moment – a target reached 90% of the time for Ozone domains versus 76% for other websites.
Craig Tuck, chief revenue officer of The Ozone Project said: “Since Ozone’s launch we’ve been incredibly confident of the ability of premium publisher websites to deliver better results for our clients’ advertising. While we’ve seen clear evidence of this in the campaigns that we have run to date, Lumen’s analysis takes this a step further and highlights what we’ve intuitively believed for years – that great quality content engages the reader more, which ultimately means more attention for clients’ advertising."
Mike Follett, managing director of Lumen, added: “High quality journalism drives deep engagement with the content, which in turn drives high levels of attention to the accompanying ads. Advertisers often say that they are in the business of ‘buying eyeballs’. In that case, they should look at the quality of those ‘eyeballs’ as well as the quantity.”
Attention data came from fully consented eye-tracking data drawn from desktop and mobile publishers to arrive at an ’attentive seconds per thousand impressions’ metric combining the absolute number of views as well as the length of time for each.