CPMs For Video Ads Register Uptick
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, August 15, 2012
Top-tier Web sites are getting viewers to watch entire videos, but still struggling to generate clicks, says TubeMogul, which found that overall, pre-roll video ads available for real-time buying
across devices continue to expand -- averaging over 211 million daily impressions, and growing by an average of 4.7% per month.
Despite click rates, CPMs for video ads are headed upward,
growing at a rate of 2.5% per month -- peaking at $9.93 in June, the video ad-buying platform found.
Broken out by day, CPMs for pre-roll video ads tend to mirror video viewing. That said,
some misalignment between price and viewing patterns emerges over the weekend, making it an ideal time for bidding.
Broken out by TubeMogul’s tiers for content quality, CPMs for
pre-roll video ads are up slightly across the board, and are highest for tier one sites -- which grew to an average of $10.19 in the second quarter.
Also of note, tier two sites averaged
only slightly higher ($0.14) CPMs than tier three sites, perhaps making them an overall bargain, the findings suggest.
At 81.3% overall, video ads run on tier one sites had the highest
completion rates, while comScore100 sites differ little from the overall average, with completion rates for 30-second ads differing by only 0.1%.
Ad size was closely related to video watched. Indeed, TubeMogul considers video ad size is a near-perfect proxy for getting consumers to watch an entire video ad, with 96% completions for larger video players compared to 80% for smaller players.
As more consumer time shifts online a buoying of rates is certain to follow.
That said the idea that top-tier that a click metric is important when running an online video campaign is a bit of a stretch. Television commercials have proven to be a strong brand awareness, and commerce driver. Measuring success of a video campaign by CTR is ludicrous, especially considering that a) the consumer is sitting through the commercial in order to get to the content they want and b) CTR represents less than 99.5% of any audience.
The value to marketers in online video is
1) The impact of the medium.
2) Placement of advertising in front of the best possible audiences.
3) Negation of the remote control and DVR.
Value added - you reach cord cutters with effective brand advertising.
The upward pressure on CPM rates will likely drive spikes and oversold scenarios during prime in-market periods in November and December. Unfortunately as in past years, this will cause ads to be placed in low quality syndicated players or, even worse, in-banner video placements. It’s time for brands (and the video ad industry) to begin fully endorsing and validating alternative formats for the delivery of :15 and :30 video ads, such as video interstitials, in order to bring liquidity to the market, keep runaway cpm rates in check, with the added benefit of reaching audiences beyond the tiny percentage of video content sites across all devices.