Facebook Testing Mid-Roll Ads
There has been growing concern about the quality of pre-roll “views”. Our own research has shown that over 2/3rds of users don’t actually watch the pre-roll ads. Facebook has been looking to better monetize videos published on their platform and it seems they’ve found the answer in mid-roll ads. In contrast to pre-roll ads one might see before watching a YouTube video, a mid-roll ad will appear in the middle of the video. Testing of the mid-roll ads within Facebook’s live videos began last August.
The social media giant has some conditions for their video publishers if they want to start implementing ads, however. The video must be at least 90 seconds long and the ad will only show once the user has been watching the video for at least 20 seconds. While this does post a challenge to video publishers, it seems to show a trend towards quality over quantity. While Facebook has traditionally held that a “view” constitutes a user watching at least three seconds of a video, it’s hard to tell whether the user is actually watching the full video since videos on Facebook automatically start playing once they show up in the user’s feed. The restrictions force the publisher to create a high-quality video that is engaging enough that the user will want to continue watching, instead of simply closing out the video before the ad even begins.
At Solve Media, we invented the branded, “Type-In to Skip” function to help advertisers reach real humans who are actually watching video content.
