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Here's an example of an implementation using Prebid, sound is available on mouse-over.

Instream

Coming soon..Instream video presents many more challenges to overcome as a publisher, most publishers with long-form instream content not only have to deal with DRM but also ensuring their ad load and user experience does not lead users to ad-blocking, or worse!

As such we do have some general recommendations for a good instream experience, mostly taken from the experiences of the author and discussions internally regarding what we like and don't like about streaming sites.

• Short Content (News, Blog-roll, etc)
  • Try to keep the total pre-roll ad length well under the total content length
    • No one wants to see 2x30s ads prior to viewing 90 seconds of content.
    • We recommend a single 15/30s ad spot before 90 seconds of content.
    • Publishers with lots of very short content should consider enforcing skippable ads, not showing ads, or augmenting this short content with surrounding display ads.
  • Mini-Players
    • Some publishers use a mini-player to continue showing the content as the user scrolls through content.
    • We believe this is a great way to keep the ad and content in view.
  • Auto-play with sound is fine here, however, the video player should be in-view and center-stage (Autoplay with sound out of view is usually a policy violation with most, if not all, video demand partners)
• Long Form Content
  • Try to keep mid-roll breaks under something manageable.
    • If you're serving ads and content on a mobile device you don't want users to bounce or watch content elsewhere, if it's within your means try A/B testing a reduced ad-load to see if there's a revenue impact when improving UX.
    • If you're serving ads and content on a desktop device you're probably fine using 2-3 minutes of ad content in breaks of, for example, a 42 minute television episode, however, users may leave ads running and alt-tab out, reducing your viewability.
  • Skippable is your friend
    • In order to keep users coming back to your tab and site content enabling skippable is a means of training the user to return to your content more quickly.

Considerations

Please keep in mind any recommendations or configurations we express above may not be the appropriate solution for your business. Publishers are complex with not only user experience requirements, but also business reporting and management requirements which may collide with the expressions above.

As such we recommend ensuring that anything implemented in your network is just that, made for your network.

District M offers a wide variety of publishers site configuration, yield, and UX reviews available with clear and concise recommendations returned for your review.

Contact us for more information.

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