Why publishers lose more than half their video revenue?

Possible suspects

If you had to guess what could possibly be damaging your video ad revenue by more than half, you might think it to be one of the following things:

• Incorrect targeting
• Not enough ad inventory
• Low CPM categories
• Ad Blockers (has to be right?!?)

All incorrect

The actual answer is something much more core to the experience, video performance.

Gone in under 5 seconds

Take a look at a chart from a recent report by Akamai. It shows that on fast connections, people will abandon your video in under 5 seconds if there is even a small amount of delay in video load time.

5% abandonment for every 1% delay

That’s right, you will lose 5% of the audience for every delay of 1 second on a two minute video.

Great, but I use a content delivery network

Awesome, that is the first important step to combatting this issue as content delivery networks are a great way to help ensure your video gets delivered from servers nearby to your users.

52% revenue loss is with CDN

Even with a content delivery network, you will still see video buffer rates of around 14–28% and that means you are still losing at best 52% of your ad revenue because of video delivery.

Fix it and double your revenue

Video delivery is complex and cannot be solved only at the network level. That is why we focused on extending the solution into the video player and we have been able to reduce average buffering rates to as low as 2% for our customers. For an ad supported business this translates to increasing your ad revenue by 1.78X.

2% Buffer Rate => 1.78X Revenue