Rupert Murdoch created a big talking point when he put the Times Online behind a firewall – demanding that people pay to see the content. The jury is very much still out on whether it will be a successful tactic. But in the world of online video we’ve become increasingly familiar with a strategy to make our content pay: serving up pre-roll ads. You know the ones. You click on a video link, eager with anticipation for the content that it promised, only to be met with one or more ads for cars, or beer, or that frickin’ meerkat, that you are forced to watch before your video starts playing.
You’d think people wouldn’t like doing this. After all the earliest adopters of online video wanted to watch premium content for free with no advertising. YouTube’s early success was driven not by user- generated content, but by episodes of Top Gear, The Daily Show and The Simpsons. YouTube didn’t have the right to syndicate this content, of course, so they never placed ads in the videos. Once the big media companies started publishing video on their own sites, they also avoided ads because they saw online video as a marketing channel, not as a revenue-generating distribution channel. Publishing video online at that time was also difficult and expensive.
But the times they are a changing. More and more pre-roll advertising precursors web video. Even YouTube’s getting heavily in on the act for its more popular and commercial videos. This all suggests that contrary to the perceived logic of the mid-to-late naughties people are actually willing to put up with watching ads if the promised video after it is sufficiently appealing. Interestingly some research by Ooyala (who admittedly are a company that act as a middle-man between advertisers and video producers so are likely to promote such research in their own interests in a British-American-Tobacco-smoking-is good-for-you-stylee) suggest that the number 1 reason why viewers abandon a video is not bad content or heavy advertising, but constant buffering – the stop/start annoying-ness you get on videos when your internet connection isn’t feeling at its most perky. Data from tubemogul (the web video distribution company) – albeit a year old now – suggests that at least 16% of viewers abandon a video when confronted with pre-rolls. But again that’s not as high as one might have expected.
Will this trend of serving increasing amounts of pre-roll ads on web videos continue apace? As Zhou Enlai (the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China) said when asked of the impact of the French Revolution, it’s too soon to say. But given that putting ads on videos has the potential to massively impact the revenue streams of small web production houses like mine, do-us-a-favour and keep watching those pre-roll adverts would you?
