Marrying a content and video monetization strategy is no easy feat, made more complicated when video is added to the mix. While placing video content within articles is hardly a new trend, the market has advanced dramatically in recent years, with an array of new possibilities for both content selection and monetization.
Lack of exposure leads to shortage in supply
From the monetization side of video, outstream advertising is a very effective monetization tool and does an excellent job of bridging the gap between instream and display ads by creating massive video supply. Instream, while generally struggling for supply (YouTube and large broadcasters aside), is still the preferred choice of buyers.
This preference for instream extends beyond the familiarity of a TV-like experience. For instance, viewers are already committed to watching the video content beyond the ad, which leads to a better performance on KPI’s such as viewability and completion rates. The increased level of performance for advertisers also means higher CPMs for publishers, meaning both sides are happy with the benefits from instream.
This is all well and good, but from the editorial perspective, creating enough content to generate sufficient instream inventory is not so straightforward and presents numerous challenges.
Content production is often timely and expensive, while buying in content from other sources is also a costly endeavour. The rate of video production simply cannot keep up with the modern day, 24 hour news cycle, especially if video content is not being recycled across multiple articles. Cutting to the core of the problem – while instream ads may yield well, the costs involved (production, editing, technology costs such as OVP’s, Ad Servers, SSPs) mean profitability for all the hard work is no guarantee.
Enter the contextual content player
The general trend for video content to date was to have a video piece that went hand in hand with a news article. What this leads to however, is a situation where due to the reasons detailed above, a large number of article pages, varying by publisher type but on average in the region of 50%, will not contain video content. Conflicting with this, is the fact that many of those pages without video are of similar subject matter to those with video, given we live in an age where each story is fleshed out across numerous articles.
With the above taken into account, it is logical that relevant video content pieces should therefore be considered to run on numerous articles, where they will still fit seamlessly with the topics at hand. This in turn reduces costs while increasing instream supply in a way that benefits both publisher and advertiser.
With a large amount of video content sitting stagnant in publisher’s media libraries, the contextual content player puts this to good use and allows publishers to skip the process of manually creating playlists by simply embedding a native player on article pages. The video player scrapes data from the page in order to display an instantly generated playlist of video content that is most relevant to the page, matching key metadata from the videos to the article. This enables publishers to serve relevant video content to users at the time when they’re most engaged, and also fully addresses the issue of content discovery by leveraging an existing video library to keep viewers interested beyond the first clip.
Making use of such technological advancements requires minimal manual work, is extremely easy to activate and will lead to the below results.
- Reduced costs while creating scale
- Increased dwell time on pages with relevant video content of 33% (source- VI)
- Massive gains in relevant preroll inventory – large uplift in publisher revenue
- Boosts perception of publisher from both users and brands
- Satisfies both editorial and advertising teams
If you’d like to know more about contextual video suggestions, and our advanced Blue Billywig Suggests feature, you can contact us at hello@bluebillywig.com.
