5 Insights about video monetization from Ad Week Europe
Digital video has become the hottest advertising format in the media world. For publishers, this rapid growth has posed a number of crucial questions: “Is video advertising scalable? Can you really stake your business on it? Is it better than display?”
At Advertising Week Europe this past March, JW Player COO Bill Day sat down with three industry leaders to get to the bottom of these important questions at the session “Believe the Hype: Video Monetization Is Real.” Along the way, the panelists discussed their first-hand experiences of how video is driving publisher revenues. Here are five things we learned.
1) Video now accounts for 35% of all online ad spending.
After years of anticipation, video advertising is now aligning with the growth in video viewing among consumers.
“Any great ad medium sits on top of a huge shift in consumption,” Day said, noting that video now accounts for 35% of all online ad spending.
Time Inc. product manager Umar Nadat believes that “video is the future,” which is why the company now publishes video content alongside written articles whenever appropriate. This integrated editorial strategy has helped Time UK achieve 252% year-over-year growth in video revenues.
2) In the era of walled gardens, publishers need to diversify.
Facebook’s recent algorithm shift has served to remind publishers that there’s lots of money on Facebook and Google, but it’s dangerous to become too dependent on a single third-party platform.
“It’s all about diversification and making sure we’re not foes with those guys, but we’re staying out of being dependent on one point of capture,” said Sherzod Rizaev, global head of commercial ops for the sports publisher Minute Media.
As Day put it, “Diversification doesn’t mean abandonment.”
3) Publishers need to make their videos easily accessible to users.
The dominance of walled gardens also means that publishers need to be smart about how they monetize videos and engage the visitors they bring in from outside platforms.
When Time UK pays to acquire traffic, Nadat says the company makes sure that it’s linking to pages where video content is front-and-center and easy for the user to find.
4) Programmatic is now the dominant stream of publisher advertising revenues.
Like many publishers, Minute Media is now selling a majority of its inventory programmatically, with 85% of global ad revenues coming through programmatic channels.
Léon Siotis, UK & Southern Europe managing director at the ad-tech platform SpotX, added that terms like “premium programmatic” are no longer necessary because “programmatic is just your sales channel.”
5) Header bidding can be good, but not good enough.
Header bidding has increased ad revenue for many publishers, but setup can still be difficult and time-consuming.
Time UK added header bidding for video this past summer, and the results have been positive. On Black Friday, the company saw CPMs of up to £50, performance Nadat described as “one of the most insane things ever.”
However, Nadat noted that implementation is still “clunky” for video header bidding, a problem that JW Player is overcoming with our new server-side Video Player Bidding solution, in partnership with SpotX.
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