• by Philip Rosenstein , September 21, 2016

According to a new Ooyala study on second-quarter video usage released Wednesday, mobile devices now account for 51% of all online video views -- up 15% from 2015, with a strong 203% increase from 2014.

Ooyala’s study analyzed 3.5 billion daily video events from more than 220 million global viewers.

The report found strong growth in programmatic video on a global scale, attributing the increase to more quality content being available through real-time bidding markets.

Ooyala noted a 50% increase in real-time bidding transactions in the second quarter. Long-tail inventory CPMs were around $9.5, with CPMs for fixed price deals averaging between $15 and $17. Significantly, average video CPMs in second price auctions grew to between $19-$21.

In the second quarter, the highest percentage of pre-roll impressions for publishers occurred on computers -- at 50.4% -- with 31.8% of impressions on mobile phones and 17.7% on tablets.

Pre-roll ad completion rates for publishers were highest on smart TVs, at  83%. The completion rate on tablets was also high at 81%, with computer users completing 76% of pre-roll ads, and mobile phone users completing 74%.

The report also studied the habits of three types of video models: advertising, subscription and transactional. “Power Users,” those who consume video content at least seven days per month, had noticeably different viewing patterns in each category.

-- Advertising model power users were 37% more likely to visit news sites during the workweek than over the weekend. These same users were 17% more likely to visit entertainment sites on Thursday and Friday when compared to Monday through Wednesday traffic.

-- 76% of subscription model power users visited subscription-based video sites at least two to three days per week, with peak traffic coming on Friday and Saturday, and lowest traffic on Monday.

-- Transaction model power users were 13x more likely to stream transactional content on weekends than during the week.