People love watching videos online. Every statistic I’ve seen confirms that sharing and viewing videos has become a part of everyday life, and that the gap between video ad spending and audience attention is slowly narrowing.
TrueView ads, pioneered on YouTube, differ from traditional video ads in two main ways. First, they give viewers a choice. The ad may be skippable or it may present choice of ads to watch. Second, TrueView ads are sold on Cost Per View (CPV) basis. You may be familiar with Cost Per Click (CPC), in which the advertiser pays only when someone clicks one of their ads. With CPV, advertisers are charged only when viewer chooses to watch an ad.
This kind of viewing experience is catching on, and with good reason. According to the TrueView OneSheet, advertisers are seeing 3-4x higher clickthrough rates than other video ad formats. There are currently two types of video ads promoted by YouTube, “TrueView in-search” and “TrueView in-display”. Additional targeting options include demographic and geographic filters. These new formats are changing the way the videos are being made. Advertisers are beginning to place the most “interesting” parts of an ad video near the beginning in order to entice the viewer to keep watching.
For example, say you’re about to watch an interview with the makers of a new movie on The Hollywood Reporter. A TrueView in-stream video ad starts to play and counter appears, giving you the option, after five seconds, to skip the ad and continue watching the video.
I believe TrueView is big win for users, publishers and advertisers. Users now have more control over the ads they see, advertisers get to combine the engagement of video with the precision of online advertising, and publishers see higher returns, since advertisers value truly engaged audience and create their content accordingly.
A small group of AdSense video publishers are already using YouTube TrueView video ads for portion of their video inventory, and they have seen RPMs equal to or better then standard pre-roll ads, combined with a significantly improved user experience. To top it off, YouTube TrueView video ads help to decrease audience drop-off rates by 40% on YouTube Partner sites when compared to regular in-stream ads, which means more viewers are continuing to watch those videos.
