Video advertisements are getting much more prevalent, and while their impact can be significant, the results can also be exaggerated. Jim Louderback recently penned an op-ed at Ad Age {link no longer active} talking about the very real problem confronting the Internet video marketing industry.
“Stream fraud takes a number of forms,” Louderback writes. “It starts when a publisher claims more views than were actually consumed. This is relatively easy to do, as the accepted industry standard today for a video view is a play-start, rather than some percentage of video view completion. It results in widely inflated view counts in almost every case: According to web video analytics company Tubemogul, more than a third of video viewers bail out by 30 seconds, and by two minutes, less than a quarter of starters have stuck around.”
“Here at Revision3 we don’t call it a view until we’ve delivered the entire video — admittedly conservative, but I think it’s absolutely the right thing to do. I’ve written a lot about this type of overcounting of video views, but it’s only a part of the problem. At least a play-start actually shows some sort of interest, or intent, on the part of the viewer,” he continued. “A bigger problem, in my book, is when video gets force-fed and autoplayed out of context and unasked for. Autoplay makes sense when it is in context and the user has an expectation that video will be played. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about an out-of-context video autoplaying on a page, without any user initiation, and about something completely apart from the content on the page or the links that led to it.”
