Adverts placed in long-form video content draw higher completion rates according to FreeWheel’s Q3 2012 report.
Long form video content of 20+ minutes appears to be the optimum choice for running adverts in. FreeWheel’s Video Monetization report which was released this month stated that the completion rates for ads placed in long-form content improved to 93% in Q3, which is the highest recorded rate ever. The completion rate for mid form content (5-20 minutes) was 79% and for short term content (under 5 minutes) the completion rate was 67%.
The report is based on professionally produced and rights-managed video content and the results draw interesting yet perhaps unsurprising conclusions. Despite the number of video ads increasing to around 7 adverts per video, from the previous 5 adverts in Q3 2011, completion rates for the adverts have still grown from 82% to 93%. This suggests that viewers are willing to watch a higher frequency of advertisements in return for compelling and entertaining content.
Despite ads receiving a higher completion rate amongst long form video content, most of the videos viewed online are short form. In Q3 of 2012 87% of professional video views were of short form, 11% were of medium form and only 2% were of long form.
Video views of rights-managed content is increasing with a 17% growth year over year in Q3 of 2012. However, the incline of video advert views is even better. In comparison, in Q3 2012, video ad views were up 49% year over year. The report concludes, “consumer appetite for video viewing continues to be outpaced by advertiser demand.”
This last statement is supported by a study from Digiday and Adap.tv which surveyed over 700 professionals from the digital media industry. Of the 700 participants, 97% stated that their digital video ad spend is up this year with an average increase of 27%. The respondents also anticipated that spending on digital video advertising would increase a further 20% in 2013.
At present Apple is leading the way with mobile video views with reports unveiling that Apple mobile platforms have received almost 2 times the number of Android. Video viewing on Mac devices was up by approximately 300% year over year in Q3 whilst in the same quarter of 2011 video views on Mac devices comprised less than 3% of all views. A year later it accounted for a share of nearly 10% (more than 1.3 billion video views).
Of those viewing figures, Apple iOS devices comprised almost 60% of the views. The 60% is broken down by device as follows:
- iPhone 29%
- iPad 20.6%
- iPod 8.1%
Android devices accounted for 31.5% share of views, and the Xbox, 9.9% of views. Despite Android views being just over half that of Apple’s, views of Android devices have sharply increased by 450% year over year.
About the Report
The findings were collected in Q3 2012 from 10.7 billion video ads (pre-roll, in-stream, and post-roll) which were served on the Freewheel platform. The data is predominantly US-based; however a small percentage of views occurred outside the U.S. The data only represents video which has been rights managed and does not reflect trends for user-generated content.
