Feature
TrueView video ads, where users can skip an ad after five seconds, will now be available on YouTube videos seen on all mobile devices.
In an announcement Wednesday on the Google Mobile Ads Blog, YouTube group product manager Phil Farhi said that the site was launching its TrueView in-stream video ads because growth of YouTube video watching on mobile devices “has been phenomenal.”
To Watch, or Not to Watch
Previously, other mobile ad formats had been available for YouTube videos, including Promoted Video ads, 15-second pre-roll in-stream ads, banners, background images and gadgets.
With TrueView roll-in ads, advertisers only pay for ads that are completely viewed.
“Giving viewers choice over ads they watch has led to a better, more engaged viewing experience,” Farhi said on the company blog, adding that this approach benefits “the entire YouTube community of users, partners and advertisers.”
TrueView ads account for most of the video ads on YouTube, and the company said that they “tend to earn equal or higher revenue compared with standard video ads.”
Channel owners will not need to make any changes in order to utilize TrueView ads on mobile, if the TrueView ad option has been chosen.
Sixty Percent
In its posted statistics, the Google-owned site showed just how “phenomenal” that mobile traffic has been. Traffic from mobile devices tripled last year, and more than 20 percent of global YouTube videos now come from mobile devices. Every minute, three hours of video are uploaded to the site from mobile devices, and the site is available on 350 million such devices.
Sixty percent of the in-stream video ads on YouTube are now TrueView skippable ads.
The mobile API has previously included a flaw that enabled botting. Botting allowed video posters to buy inflated views as if they were coming from smartphones, thus moving a given video up the “most watched” ladder.
If it moved to the home page because of such views, the video could generate money based not on ads but on website views. YouTube has been working to fix the botting problem in the API, but it’s not yet clear if it has been fixed.
