Dive Brief:
- Reaching mobile viewers has become quite the challenge for marketers.
- The issue is more and more traffic is hitting websites from mobile devices. At the same time publishers and advertisers aren’t seeing value from this traffic.
- However, a new way to reach mobile viewers, via “out-stream” ads that run on text-based mobile pages, could help minimize the hurdle.
Dive Insight:
If you track the trends, mobile video is the way to grab an audience. For marketers this is a problem because there is no standard for viewability for mobile video ads. Two companies are looking to change this with “out-stream” ads that appear on mostly text-based websites, as opposed to “in-stream” ads that appear before video content.
Virool and Teads both offer out-stream ads and are charging advertisers after the ads are viewed for a certain amount of time (30 second for Teads).
The jury is out whether mobile viewers could accept this type of intrusion into their screen, but Sonja Kristiansen, head of publisher development at Virool, told The Wall Street Journal, “Traditional publishers still have massive audiences flocking to their articles. So what we are doing is unlocking video real estate on those pages.”