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Generation Video: How to Reach The Generation That Grew Up With Online Video

By Jacob Simkovich | May 4, 2020

There’s a new generation of people consuming video online and these teens and tweens have never known a world without video calling, digital video, or Netflix.

Baby Boomers grew up with TV, VHS tapes, and DVDs to watch video. For the younger generation, it’s been all about digital video. 66% of teenagers (age 13-19) watch videos online every day. For tweens (age 8-12), 56% watch digital video daily.

These digital natives are consuming a lot of videos.

Big Expectations, Big Winners

This new generation of video consumers has big expectations. They have become accustomed to high-quality video and seamless functionality. It’s provided a significant advantage for the big players who provide that experience. As video usage continues to increase, publishers will need to match those expectations if they hope to compete.

Smart players are finding ways to target this new generation using platforms like Tik Tok. The big players in the online world have developed their own video platforms to target younger viewers. Facebook has Lasso. YouTube is rolling out Shorts. Instagram serves up snackable videos.

As this generation ages, the opportunity to engage digitally-native consumers will continue to grow. Content creators that act now to improve their video delivery have the best opportunity to engage and monetize their content in the future.

It’s not just the younger set that has embraced digital video. Video consumption is growing exponentially across all age groups. 78% of people watch video online at least weekly and 55% of those watch every day.

Delivering A Quality Video Experience

The shifting expectations and surfing habits of users call for a change of editorial and monetization strategies from publishers. While focusing on well-written articles and sprinkling a few videos between them used to be enough, now it will send users straight to the hands of the players who provide the quality video experience users are accustomed to.

However, change is also an opportunity, for those who seize it. While many publishers understand the need, not many manage to shift in the right way. Making video a focus of the publishing strategy is necessary, but it is not enough. Simple straightforward methods like “create more videos”, or “create better videos” just won’t cut it. What is needed is a holistic approach, rethinking everything from scratch to deliver a quality video experience from a to z.

Maximize Your Opportunity with Video

We have gathered 4 basic concepts that will help you answer the questions of “what, where, when and how” when it comes to creating a good video experience. These will help you maximize your opportunity to leverage a new audience that is looking to discover and consume more video than ever before.

Video on Every Page

It’s said that a website’s home page is its front door. In 2020, however, more people are coming in through the side door, backdoor, or crawling in the windows. Most traffic comes from referral engines, such as social media or search.

That means most visitors will find your content on an inside page or landing page. That’s an important reason why you need to have video on every page of your website, because you can’t always anticipate where people will land.

Maximize View Time

One of your goals in 2020 should be to get people to engage more with your video. More important than visits when you are trying to maximize revenue is Viewable Duration. The longer a video is viewable, the more opportunity you have to get users ‘hooked’ on a content piece and serve ads.

Larger video players can help catch people’s attention, but users may scroll past the player and take it off-screen. One way to increase viewability is by deploying a sticky, collapsible unit. As site visitors scroll down the page, the video window shrinks but stays in view. Research by Primis shows how effective this can be: collapsible video units can increase viewability by 51% and increase revenue by 139%.

The Right Placement on Page

Another way to maximize engagement is to consider video player placement. If the video is relevant to the page content or expands on the page’s subject matter, the best placement is usually as high up on the page as possible. If possible, put your video right below the title. This gives it the most viewable placement possible for advertising while delivering the content visitors are looking for at the moment.

If the content has not been created specifically to align with the page content, but are videos you want users to discover, it is better to move the video unit down the page. This lets the user focus on the information that brought them to the page first before providing them with a recommendation for related videos. This lowers bounce rates.

Engaging and Relevant Videos

It’s pretty simple. If someone is looking for something online and lands on a page, the more related the video is to the content, the more likely it is to be viewed. Place video that supports the content or is related to the content being viewed as often as possible.

There’s a significant opportunity here. 48% of consumers say they want videos that reflect the things they are interested in. Another 33% say they expect recommendations for what they could or should do next.

Many publishers use a single video to complement the text. While it may increase viewability for that one video, it fails to take advantage of interest in related videos that can improve engagement, time on site, and increase ad views.

The concept may be simple, but the execution is not. It is incredibly time-consuming to manually place related videos on individual pages. It also relies on gut instinct rather than using data-driven placements. Publishers should use a recommendation engine to aid in the discovery of relevant videos and video ads.

Most publishers do not have access to AI-enhanced discovery engines that can analyze content and user intent. In 2020 and beyond, however, this is going to be a key to competing.

Recommendation engines allow for discovery and increase stickiness. 70% of what people watch on YouTube comes from video surfaces by its recommendation algorithm. Netflix recently revealed that more than 80% of the TV shows people watch on Netflix come from its recommendation system.

Video Consumption Continues to Increase

As younger consumers age, video viewing will only continue to increase. By 2022, it’s estimated that more than 1 million videos will be playing on the internet every second accounting for 82% of all internet traffic.

Publishers should act now to optimize their video engagement and ad revenue to fit the fast changing consumption landscape.

How Publishers Can Leverage Video Consumption Growth During Lockdown

By Julia Ovejero | April 22, 2020

When the World Health Organization officially declared coronavirus (COVID-19) a global pandemic, it solidified how serious this was going to be. With schools closed, business shut down, travel bans, and stay-at-home orders being issued by a large number of countries, it seemed everything changed. It forced people to alter their routines and priorities.

With more employees working from home and families isolated, internet use and media consumption grew significantly. Online publishers saw dramatic increases in anything coronavirus related as people sought the latest information. Also, users sought out an unprecedented level of video and entertainment options.

Significant Increases in Video Consumption

News sites saw a 30.9% increase from February to March. Entertainment content, social media, and online video all saw big jumps in consumption. Nielsen predicts that all these people staying at home can lead to a nearly 60% increase in the amount of video content being watched.

Educational companies do not stay behind: a recent report from LearnPlatform has shown that educational services saw up to a 500 percent increase in web traffic during mid-March. This is not far from the over 300 percent increase in children’s (including educational) website traffic we’ve experienced on the Primis network.

Leveraging Video Consumption Growth During Unprecedented Times

Across verticals, there has been a significant change in the supply and demand aspects of digital advertising. While overall digital ad spending has declined, video advertising has been less affected. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reports that video advertising will see some of the smallest declines in the coming months as advertisers shift spending.

There’s an opportunity to increase revenue from video if you act right now. While other types of media saw major downturns in advertising dollars, digital video advertising weathered the storm better in the start of Q2. Tracking ad buys, the IAB expects spending on video ads to increase by 27% in May and June compared to March and April spending.

The opportunity is there for those who are ready to embrace it. That means using the right technology and the right video provider that will optimize performance and user experience.

How You Can Leverage Video Even During Difficult Operating Conditions

Together with the increase in traffic and consumption, came along a considerable growth in costs. The Khan Academy, an authority in the educational industry, reported a five-fold growth in traffic, which resulted in a considerable increase in their expenses.

While most publishers are using video, many lack the expertise or technology to maximize the opportunity. That is why many publishers keep doing what they were doing before the pandemic, only with declining advertising budgets. And as many are operating under difficult work conditions during the COVID-19 outbreak, employees have been stretched thin and have even less time to optimize video.

That’s where video solutions really come into play. While you’re dealing with increased demands on your staff during the coronavirus pandemic, these companies can optimize your video activity to maximize your results. Moreover, Video discovery offers technology that allows a publisher’s video ad unit to recommend relevant video content actively. The Video Discovery Engine automatically recommends relevant video content that viewers will be interested in.

Built-in monetization, editorial automation and accurate targeting of users interests are the main elements of video discovery that help free up your editorial team, as well as your adops crew. When users are presented with the most suitable videos, it increases engagement, time on site, view-through rates (VTRs), and revenue opportunities without any additional work on your part. It queues contextually relevant video using artificial intelligence to serve videos most likely to convert.

Additionally, they should incur all of the costs associated with scaling video, including the player itself, ad serving costs as well as the costly video bandwidth. These elements make video discovery perfectly suited to dealing with the explosion in video consumption.

In conclusion, although some of the reasons why video consumption is up are not pleasant, the fact remains that now is an important time to make sure that your monetization is working at peak efficiency. If we can help with that, let us know.

Video Demand and Supply in the COVID-19 Era

By Maayan Segal | April 2, 2020

Many of our partners and friends have been asking us what trends we are seeing since COVID-19 stormed into our lives. We’ve shared that there have been some dramatic changes in video consumption. Here is what we’re seeing in demand, supply, and the resulting inventory quality/KPIs:

Demand Changes

Advertising budgets have always been affected by many elements throughout the year, including seasonal changes, holidays, regional elections, the Super Bowl, and other events. In the last few weeks, there has been an abnormal impact on the advertising ecosystem, the likes of which we haven’t seen for years.

As you might expect, the whole tourism vertical is down. It’s a tough time for hotels, airlines, booking apps, and travel sites. We are also seeing a downward trend in ad spend for other categories including real estate and lifestyle. For obvious reasons, people are not booking trips or thinking about moving at this time.

We’ve seen a decrease in ad spend from sports but, interestingly, there’s been an increase in traffic to sports-related content. More on that later.

Online ordering has increased as supermarkets and restaurants are changing the way they operate as people are isolating themselves. We’re also seeing an increase in technology and education ads across the internet.

Other categories that are increasing ad spend are pharmacy, hygiene, mental care, all related to the current virus spread.

“You’re stuck at home. Have a beer!” That may not be the exact wording you’re hearing on ads, but it’s close. Many beer companies have increased their ad spend. The same goes for nearly anything food related.

Companies in other categories that use their ad dollars for “buy now” offers are slowing or changing their messaging. They are focusing more on home delivery or reassuring branding messages to customers to position themselves for the coming recovery. Unless companies are forced to cut back spending because of immediate financial concerns, it’s a smart move to stay consistent or increase marketing in a crisis or economic downturn.

We haven’t seen anything like this in our lifetimes. While we’re dealing with the health concerns daily, we are also beginning to better understand the economic impact this is having on individuals and businesses. As a reference point, we can look at previous economic downturns as evidence of what happens when advertisers cut back spending. Examining results from dozens of studies from each of the past 10 decades has demonstrated a consistent theme: companies that continued to advertise, or increase advertising dollars during tough times, significantly grew their market share during the crisis. Companies that remain aggressive with their advertising budgets during economic crises reported sales 2.5X the average of all other businesses and maintained their enhanced market share for at least three years afterward.

Supply Changes

News and business traffic are breaking records. Verizon, one of the world’s largest mobile carriers, saw traffic spike 20% in just the first few weeks of the coronavirus reporting. Traffic jumped another 30% when Italy went into lockdown and another 8-10% when cases started to proliferate in South Korea and the United States.

Users are spending more time consuming content, specifically video content. We’ve been seeing an increase in video content duration, which has been particularly noticeable in mobile web and tablets. Ad spend on mobile web is rising accordingly.

We’ve seen the biggest jump in video consumption in the children’s vertical as schools close and kids are forced to stay at home. Parents looking for content to both educate and entertain home-bound children is exploding. There is a great opportunity to advertise to them with appropriate subject matter that is relevant and works within the legal framework for content aimed at children.

Other verticals seeing increased consumption are gaming sites and sports. The increase in consumption for sports websites is particularly counter-intuitive considering that all major sport leagues and events have been canceled.

Focus on Quality

There is actually more competition on quality inventory as buyers are becoming pickier in choosing which impressions to buy. Sites with prominent placements, high viewability, and completion rates are actually seeing increased demand from advertisers.

For publishers, it’s a smart move to create more video advertising inventory to meet this demand. There are also steps publishers should implement right now to optimize viewability for increased monetization.

Constant Change

The global pandemic is changing constantly, and people are looking to stay informed on an hourly basis. With people feeling isolated, video consumption is at all-time high levels.

Many advertisers are adapting by changing their ad creatives and messaging to better fit the time, situation and needs of their customers. Nike just did it with “Play inside, play for the world”, endorsing a clear message promoting the public’s wellbeing, and doing it in an authentic manner.

It’s important that you keep up to date with the changes. While you don’t want to position yourself as trying to profit off of the crisis, you do want to look for the right ways to serve visitors, advertisers, and customers better as their needs evolve.

In every crisis, we need to adapt, stay open-minded, and be vigilant to seek high-quality information as things evolve. If we can help, let us know.

How 5G Will Help Publishers Win with Video

By Jacob Simkovich | March 26, 2020

You’ve probably seen ads for 5G promising faster internet speeds than ever before. As 5G continues to roll-out, it is poised to change the digital space and dramatically increase consumption of digital content, especially for video.

Barring any coronavirus-related setbacks, 190 million 5G-enabled smartphones are expected to ship in 2020 as carriers continue to grow their 5G networks.

What is 5G?

5G is the next generation of mobile broadband. It’s taken 10 years to build the technology, and wireless carriers are rapidly building on their infrastructure to deploy 5G worldwide.

5G will deliver dramatically faster internet speeds to mobile devices. The first generation of 5G has the potential to increase speeds by as much as 10X current 4G LTE speeds. Future generations of 5G have the potential to increase speed by up to 100 times.

Besides faster speeds, it solves two other problems: Congestion and Latency.

If you’ve been in a crowded place, such as a sports stadium or concert, you’ve probably had that experience where internet pages won’t load, or you see that frustrating spinning wheel when you try to play a video. When there are too many devices in close proximity, the network can’t cope with it. That’s congestion. 5G solves that.

While speed is the amount of time it takes to download content, latency is the amount of time it takes for your device to communicate with servers. You can have fast speeds, but if latency is high, it can still take a long time to connect to the site and start the download or stream. Latency with 5G is reduced to nearly zero.

How Does 5G Work?

Here’s an easy way to think about how 5G works. Let’s say you’re driving down a crowded 4 lane highway that suddenly becomes just one lane. All of the cars have to merge and then squeeze through that single lane. It’s going to lead to slowdowns and backups. With 5G, all 4 lanes would stay open and keep things flowing smoothly at higher speeds.

A Dramatic Increase in Video Consumption

All of this will lead to dramatic increases in consumption. When speed, congestion, and latency are no longer barriers, the amount of content consumption is set to grow exponentially. For consumers, everything will be easier and faster. For digital publishers, they will face a more demanding audience with a rabid appetite for content, especially video.

Video consumption is expected to increase fourfold in just a few short years.

While people of all ages are consuming video, Millennials and Generation Z are watching videos at ever-increasing rates. 66% of teens (aged 13-19) already watch online videos daily. Video viewing in that age group has doubled in the past five years. These Gen Z video consumers are watching at a much higher rate than other generations.

All of this signifies an even bigger shift in video consumption, it is also changing what’s expected of content providers. The next generation of consumers will have no tolerance for low-quality or poor user experiences.

How Publishers Win in a 5G World

5G creates a tremendous opportunity for digital publishers. Publishers that want to win in a 5G world need to invest now in ways to improve digital content. Those that can distribute video at scale and target it smartly will position themselves to reap the rewards of increased consumption and monetization.

Here are five steps you need to take to be ready for 5G:

Place videos on every page.
Place video that is contextually relevant to page content.
Use the ideal video unit to maximize the viewable duration.
Use scalable video units to fit every device.
Deploy a powerful discovery engine.

It all starts with deploying the right technology. You may need a tech partner that can scale endlessly to accommodate volume while providing visitors with a seamless experience, especially on mobile. Your tech partner will need to be able to serve up the right type of video player in the right location(s) on your site to maximize the viewability of your video ad inventory. They will also need to provide constantly updated high-quality content to augment whatever you create and have advanced targeting options to optimize opportunities.

Putting videos on every page and making them contextually relevant is impossible to handle manually. You’ll need a tech partner that can handle both tasks using advanced algorithms.

The challenge for many publishers right now isn’t creation, it’s discovery. How do you get people to find your videos, engage with them, and monetize them? Primis solves this problem by automatically playing and recommending relevant video content that will appeal to visitors with page-specific and user-specific targeting. Contextual video units can be implemented seamlessly into your site on any (and every) page.

Contact Primis today and let us show you how we can take your video to a new level of monetization and help you win in a 5G world.

Syndication and its Role in Maximizing Video Engagement

By Omri Polak | March 23, 2020

We all know videos are essential to a publisher’s editorial and ad revenue strategy. According to Single Grain, websites with videos attract two to three times as many visitors and, on top of that, landing pages with videos are 53% more likely to rank on the first SERP.

Unfortunately, publishing quality video content at scale is difficult for most publishers. It isn’t easy to create videos for each article or page in today’s fast-paced environment, unless you have an entire team of people working on it day in and day out. And then it’s not affordable.

That’s where video syndication can really help.

What is Video Syndication?

Through syndication, you gain access to a huge library of videos from your industry’s top content creators across the globe. There are videos designed to fit any user, vertical, or context on any page, so you can reach your audience interest, at the time that they are consuming related content.

When your videos perfectly match your audience you’ll increase your video consumption, raise engagement, encourage returning users, provide users with a great experience and finally, create more video inventory.

5 Reasons Video Syndication is Valuable

With video syndication, you don’t have to be an expert video creator to make videos work for you and your users. Syndication allows you to distribute high-quality video content to your users to maximize video consumption, engagement, and ad revenue.

When you have access to video syndication, you can:

1. Leverage and Benefit from a Rich Video Library

The more videos you have access to, the more chances you have to reach your customers and sell your product/services. It’s a simple equation. The key is to consistently deliver quality content that users engage with, and that means having access to an expansive video library.

Syndication libraries help you discover high-quality video content from top brands, allowing you to tailor your video distribution to your users. There’s a video for every user, content idea, or article, so you deliver the most relevant video for each session without any extra work on your part.

2. Align Your Website With Big Name Brands & High-Quality Providers

To get the most out of your content, it’s not just about making more videos. That just drowns your audience in noise. Instead, you need access to videos that enhance your brand’s message, backed by leading content providers. That’s where video syndication from top brands and video producers can help.

When you share quality videos from top publishers and big-name brands, your users are more likely to engage with you. They’ll feel confident in your knowledge and brand, which will make it easier to reach new audiences and monetize the results. Syndication helps to match the right videos from the right providers to the right audience at the right time and place.

3. Associate Your Site with Known Brands in the Same Vertical

There’s a lot of content online, some would say too much. And that means it can be difficult to stand out and get noticed. However, if you can associate your website with well-known brands within your same vertical, you can capitalize on their thought leadership and brand trust.

Sharing videos from leading brands can help you make a memorable impression on your consumers and demonstrate that you are on par with your competitors. It also means more viewers and higher engagement because people are more likely to watch things from sources they can trust and they recognize as thought leaders in your vertical. Think of video syndication as a simple and fundamental way to build your brand through association.

4. Enjoy a Constant Stream of Content

Creating videos is time-consuming and expensive, which is why many publishers have a very limited content lineup. Those who have a constant lineup of quality videos are having a hard time finding the resources to finance it. The good news is that syndicated videos from top publishers can fill that void.

Through syndication, you can send out a constant stream of videos most likely to capture your audience’s attention and increase consumption. This translates into better monetization and additional video ad inventory- without any costs!

5. Leverage Tech to Automatically Choose the Perfect Video for Each Situation

Using technology, you can generate personalized video content that appeals to your specific audience’s needs and interests, helping you capitalize on the type of content your customers want most.

When done correctly, video syndication ensures that every video is optimized for relevancy and user interest while boosting video content distribution. This type of contextual matching shows your audience the content they want to engage with, and thus the content most likely to earn ad revenue.

Leveraging Syndicated Video

Syndication is important to have so that you can have high quality and highly relevant video content on every page of your website. Syndicated videos can deliver true value to your brand by helping your users discover high-quality content on your website.

You’ll stay more relevant by having videos related to every article and user interest – increasing video consumption – and you’ll enhance your brand’s portfolio through content expertise. The key is to leverage video syndication technology in a way that allows you to reap the rewards of video without the heavy expenses.

Maximizing Viewability for Increased Monetization

By Kean Graham | March 19, 2020

Having the best combination of display and video ads to monetize your traffic is great, but if your viewability isn’t up to snuff, don’t expect to earn much. It’s a simple concept. Viewability is the visibility of your ads on a web page. Ads need to be seen for users to click on them or to learn about a brand, advertisers to make conversions, and publishers to earn ad revenue.

The industry is moving more and more towards viewability as a critical measure of performance. Ads are considered viewable when at least 50% of the ad’s pixels are in view of the user; one second for display, two seconds for video. What can publishers do to maximize their viewability? In this post, we’ll share with you some of MonetizeMore’s favorite methods for improving viewability on a site.

Improve viewability for display ads

In this section, we’ll share some tips to improve viewability with a focus on display ads in general. We will also go over viewability tips regarding video ads, further down in the piece.

Prevent ad fraud

Even though fraudsters often have high viewability, ad fraud has tremendous adverse effects on the ad tech industry. When fraudulent or invalid traffic views your ads, it can cause you a whole lot of problems. You can risk losing your ad accounts; you probably won’t get paid the ad revenue you earned because of clawbacks, and advertisers may lose trust in your site.

The effects relate to viewability as well, since traffic from bots or uninterested users will view your ads. Ad fraud is an industry-wide problem that won’t be solved overnight. Still, you can take steps to protect your business and improve viewability rates using solutions like Traffic Cop. In return, only real users view your ads, viewability rates increase, clawbacks and invalid traffic bans cease, and you protect your business.

Ad layouts, ad sizes & ad units

Some ad layouts tend to produce better results than others. Placing an ad at the top of your page versus in the footer, where users probably need to scroll down to reach, will have a significant impact on viewability. Horizontal ads often result in high viewability rates when placed above the fold. Vertical ads placed along the sidebar can also produce great viewability rates. Test the following ad sizes for vertical placements: 120×240, 240×400, 160×600, and 120×600.

Sticky ads are ads that stay in a fixed position as the user scrolls down the page. Having a sticky ad in your sidebar will ensure that the ad is always in view, increase viewability and maximize your chances for optimal ad revenue.

Additional insights that require more technical knowledge

Please note that all the tips mentioned above will have a tremendous impact on your viewability rates. However, if you have the capacity and knowledge to make more technical decisions, also try the following:

-Avoid aggressive ad refreshes: In some cases, this will shorten the time available for ads to be viewed and could result in low viewability rates.

-Avoid too many layers in the passback chain: This could result in slow ad rendering.

Improve viewability for video ads

Many of the tips mentioned above are also applicable to publishers who focus on monetizing their traffic with video ads. Here are some additional insights specifically targeted to video ads:

Do not set up more than 1 ad unit per page where it’s allowed

We recommend choosing a dedicated placement for a video ad unit. If you allow video across all your inventory in a page, you risk slowing down the site and hurting user experience. Once you have decided which ad unit can accept video format, set up your rules to ensure that only display ads can serve on the rest of the ad units.

Test your video ads before going live

Video ads often require more testing than display ads. The last thing you want is to implement a video ad unit on your site, run traffic through it, and discover that it wasn’t displaying correctly. You will undoubtedly decrease viewability and lose out on ad revenue.

Either use a trusted video ad unit like Primis Video Discovery or check out our guide on testing a new ad using Google Ad Manager.

Make sure out-stream ads fit within your layout

Depending on the type of out-stream video ad you serve, you need to make sure that it fits within your page layout so that the whole video is viewable to your users. For example, if it serves on the right-hand corner, its size should be the same as your sidebar.

Focus on user experience and page behavior

This tip ties in with those previously mentioned. It would be best if you observed your users’ behavior after you’ve deployed the ad. Make sure that the video ad does not distract users or hurt the user experience of your website. As a best practice, keep video ads muted by default, unless the user clicks to un-mute it.

Once you’ve implemented your video ads and followed the tips mentioned above, you should experience an increase in viewability and higher-paying CPMs.

The Video Consumption Renaissance

By Simcha Weil | March 17, 2020

Today, people are consuming more online video than ever before, and that trend is only set to get stronger.

With advances in technology for mobile devices and the near-ubiquity of smartphones, there has arisen a veritable renaissance of video consumption.

5G connectivity will take that to an even higher level. With speeds 10 to 100 times faster than current 4G connectivity, it will make video viewing on mobile devices a more seamless experience

At the same time, digital video advertising is outpacing all other forms of advertising. For publishers and content producers, the opportunity – already large – will grow even more with 5G.

How Does The Video Consumption Renaissance Affect Me?

As with any major shift in consumer behaviour, there will be winners and losers. If you are ready for it, there are huge benefits to reap. We put together all of our best data-based tactics to make sure the huge increase of video consumption happens on your digital assets. If you want to learn everything publishers need to know about increasing video consumption, leading to an even bigger increase in video monetization, then this is the guide for you.

In this guide we packed as many actionable insights as possible, in the interest of helping publishers get ready for the massive changes and challenges 5G technology will create for their business models

Jacob Simkovich

Head of Marketing, Primis

In this Whitepaper, you will learn:

What’s driving this dramatic increase in video consumption.
The evolving consumer video consumption habits.
Actionable tactics you can deploy to take advantage of these trends to improve engagement, viewing duration, and ultimately monetization

If you’re interested in learning more about how to best prepare your ad ops strategy for this impending shift, then download our comprehensive guide here.

How to Create a Personalized Content Experience With Video

By Sarah Hughes | February 13, 2020

The popularity of video content is widely known, as well as its potential for boosting SEO. But as that awareness grows, so too does the proliferation of video content. There’s simply a lot of video out there—on YouTube, on Facebook, on social media channels, on websites, in ads, etc. Content marketers are understandably concerned about creating video content that stands out, gets noticed, captures and maintains engagement, and generates results.

Personalization is a growing trend that marketers are capitalizing on. The more specifically, and narrowly, marketers can define their audiences, the better they’re able to create and deliver content specific to their audience’s needs and interests. Generic content designed to appeal to the masses usually appeals to no one. Personalized content, designed to suit the needs, preferences and interests of well-defined target audiences is what savvy content marketers are striving for.

When it comes to personalization, there are many options available to content marketers, depending on their audiences and objectives. Here we take a look at a few approaches that Wibbitz clients have taken to connect on a personal level with their target audiences.

Personalized Based on Delivery Format

With so many options for video viewing these days, content marketers hoping to connect effectively need to consider the viewing experience for various platforms and adapt their video accordingly. That’s what Dr. Oz did with videos answering the question of “Do you have a sweet or salty tooth?” and then telling us why that may be the case. These videos were designed to display optimally for landscape, square and vertical screens.

Personalized to Different Personal Preferences

Does your audience like classical music or hip-hop? Hotdogs or caviar? Science fiction or rom-com? Patriots or Broncos? Whatever the answer is it matters—a lot. Personalizing video content to appeal to various user preferences for music, food, movies, sports teams, or a wide range of other possibilities, is a great way to immediately engage them and keep them engaged with your content.

That’s the approach that USA TODAY Sports team takes for creating engaging website content. They create personalized content for each of their sites that appeal to different sports team fans.

Personalized to a Single, Specific Target

There’s nothing more personal than watching a video that speaks directly to you. That’s the approach that FleishmanHillard took with their client BlueCurrent Group to help them pitch their services to LDC. More engaging than a typical pitch, the video delivers on the promise of: “Let us spell out why we think BlueCurrent is the best agency for LDC.” Potential clients don’t want to feel like they’re just one of the masses of organizations receiving a pitch. They want to feel special. With personalized videos they do.

Follow the Numbers

Personalization is the answer to content creators trying to stand out from the masses and video is the way to go according to statistics from a wide range of sources. Single Grain, for instance, tells us that:

Websites with videos attract 2-3 times as many visitors
Landing pages with videos are 53% more likely to rank on the first SERP
We’re approaching the point where 80% of all Internet traffic will be video traffic

But that traffic, as the examples above illustrate, will be better traffic if it’s personalized. In fact, according to one study, 79% of companies that exceed their revenue goals have a documented strategy for personalized marketing. This likely comes as no surprise to content marketers who already recognize the power of personalization.

A study by Evergage and Researchscape International of 314 marketing professionals in a variety of industries and locations, illustrates this in a resounding way: 98% of those responding agreed that personalization helps advance customer relations—70% said it has a “strong” or “extremely strong” impact.”

The challenge? How to do it well—and how to do it within budget with confidence that you’ll achieve a solid ROI for your video marketing efforts. Request a demo of Wibbitz to give your team the power to quickly and easily create personalized video at scale.

COPPA Monetization with Primis

By Dor Simai | February 12, 2020

The internet is an amazing resource for children, when it comes to education, entertainment and more. However, if your website or app is accessible to children under the age of 13, you need to take special care to make sure you comply with a special set of rules, called COPPA.

The penalties for failing to comply can be high. Actions can be brought at the federal level and state level. Courts can hold violators responsible for civil penalties of $43,280 for each violation. Enforcement stepped up in 2019 when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled cases against Google and YouTube for $170 million and Musical.ly (now known as TikTok) for $5.7 million.

What Is COPPA?

COPPA is the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). COPPA mandates a set of rules and regulations for websites and online services, such as apps, that are directed to children less than 13 years old, or online sites or services that collect any personal information from a child less than 13.

Even if the information was given voluntarily and was not mandatory, COPPA still applies. It governs the collection or use of children’s email addresses, personal information, video, photos, audio files, or screen names if they don’t use their email address. To gather or use such information, you would need opt-in consent, parental permission, and be responsible for verifying a parent’s identity.

How COPPA Can Limit Advertising & Monetization Options

This can limit your targeting and advertising options greatly. It negates the use of passive tracking, such as pixels or cookies, without expressed permission. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) advises that any form of measurement relying on personal information is a violation of COPPA rules if a user is under 13. Their best practices include turning off data collection from an ad and using the best available technology to strip trackers.

The increased use of apps on mobile has moved many advertisers and providers to rely less on cookies and increase the use of persistent identifiers. When someone logs into an email or social media account and stays logged in, they can be recognized wherever they are on the web or mobile. This persistent ID can effectively be used to track users. However, persistent identifiers are not allowed under COPPA.

While all of this is restrictive and can greatly damage a publisher’s resulting ad revenue, these measures were put in place to protect children and limit exploitation. They prohibit some common advertising and marketing tactics, but there are solutions that you can use for monetization. The IAB recommends the use of contextual targeting. This avoids using behavioral or targeting based on audience aggregation for children.

Primis Provides Safe Video Monetization For COPPA Compliant Websites

Primis offers smart video monetization solutions to COPPA regulated sites and apps with safe demand, as part of its Video Discovery Platform.

Contextual targeting, which is an important element in the Primis Discovery Engine, is applied to safe channels in two manners. First, demand sources that are implemented for COPPA sites are utilizing contextual targeting as a safe substitute for behavioral targeting. Second, the unit matches video content to every article thereby raising engagement rates, and the resulting video consumption on site.

Primis provides publishers with a fully customizable video unit that integrates into sites and apps seamlessly. Publishers can use their own video and/or choose from a library of hundreds of thousands of engaging and appropriate videos created for children.

Primis works with sites and apps that cater to children, such as gaming and educational websites, and therefore provide them with a high-quality video solution in a safe manner. Serving the right video content to capture kids’ attention on those digital assets increases their engagement and experience, while boosting the site’s revenue stream.

Maximize video distribution and optimization with Primis, the video discovery platform. Contact Primis today and let us show you what we can do.

Video Strategy for Food & Recipe Websites

By Alon Elbaz | January 27, 2020

Being a digital publisher of a recipe or food website can be a lucrative calling. In fact, food sites on our publisher network achieve on average a CPM that is 62% higher than non-food related websites. However, standing out in the online food and recipe market is a tough task. The main problem being that visitors fall into two categories, both with real challenges for site operators.

The first category is people with only a broad outline of what they are looking for. They may be looking for inspiration for a meal for a special occasion or context. They may be looking for ways to use an unfamiliar product that they spotted on a special offer in the grocery store or want to learn how to use up a glut of produce from the garden. If the visitor isn’t sure what they are looking for, it’s even harder for a static web page to meet their needs and the bounce rate keeps on rising.

The second category is people looking for something specific such as a recipe for a particular dish. Standing out here is also tough as often the recipe is a standard and while that special twist or secret ingredient makes a mouthwatering difference, search engines don’t have taste buds.

Many sites instead try to distinguish themselves with personality, telling an epic backstory of family tradition or foreign travel before getting to the recipe, but the big risk here is readers who simply want to get to the “how to” and click away in frustration. That’s shown in stats from SimilarWeb showing even some top ten food websites have average visits barely beating the one minute mark and bounce rates exceeding 80 percent.

Culinary Vision

Given these challenges, it’s no wonder video has proven to be key in the food and recipe world online. It’s no secret that video is the secret ingredient for any website in building traffic: pages with video not only bring in more traffic, but make sites more sticky. The culinary world is particularly ripe for taking advantage of video.

At its most basic, video enhances the sensual experience of the online food enthusiast. Perhaps more importantly, it brings an element that plain text and static images can’t provide. Video is the best way to demonstrate a specific technique, while for less confident home chefs, it’s incredibly helpful to know what food should look like at a given stage of the preparation and cooking process.

Mobile Maturity

Technology will only increase the appetite for video on food sites. 4G and 5G networks and the slow-but-discernible decline of the data cap means being at a desktop computer or having wi-fi is no longer necessary to get the full foodie experience in video form.

The dominance of the tablet computer also lends itself to video sites: few home cooks have the space for a laptop on their kitchen counter, but a tablet is small and portable enough to use even in the messiest kitchen.

Video Discovery on Cooking Websites

So, what’s the best way to take advantage of the market for food and recipe video? Enticing users to watch additional videos, whether produced in-house or commissioned externally is certainly an option that works well for many sites, but it’s not the only solution.

Externally sourced video brings a welcome form of double-dipping: engaging content that attracts and retains visitors to a site by building on existing content while opening a source of income through a slice of ad revenues. It’s also a great way to adjust to seasonal variations in marketing campaigns and budgets.

Manually figuring out what’s right to show a particular visitor to a particular page can be a time consuming and imprecise proposition, however.

That’s where video discovery platforms fit the bill. They use smart technology to deliver relevant and targeted content that keeps users sticking on a site for second helpings and more. Thinking back to the challenges facing food websites, it’s the ideal way to serve both types of visitor: the ones looking for inspiration and the ones looking for a specific recipe. Video discovery platforms help foodies find what they are looking for, but also the idea or technique they didn’t know they needed.

The secret is the way a well-designed discovery platform can figure out context. By analyzing what the user is reading or watching, it can spot clues such as dietary tastes, preferred cooking styles, key ingredients and so much more. That means offering more relevant videos that the user is more likely to watch.

That is why food publishers using the Primis unit are able to not only achieve industry standard when it comes to time-on-site, but also reach an average duration that is 14% higher than other sites. A big contributing factor is that users watching the Primis unit on food sites spend an average of 26 more seconds watching the video unit than on other sites in the network.

The Proof is in the Pudding

The Primis video discovery platform is already satiating the appetites of visitors to food sites. One site that specializes in real recipes from home cooks integrated the Primis player at the start of 2019, combining its existing in-house video inventory with external clips.

The results were spectacular: in the space of four months, its video ad revenues rose by almost 150%. Just as with diners at the table, presentation counts: a big part of the success was the ease of use and customization, with the recommendation thumbnails attracting the attention of visitors.

The Bottom Line

Video discovery is a perfect fit for food and recipe site visitors, prompting them to spend longer on a site and return more often. Not only can a video discovery platform increase your opportunity to monetize visitors through direct and affiliate sales and on-site advertising, but you can also pick up valuable revenue from delivering external videos that serve your audience’s needs. Contact Primis to learn more about this recipe for success.