3 Mobile Video Best Practices for Digital Publishers
It’s no surprise that video is king of mobile.
Online video accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic and is expected to reach 117.2 million regular viewers within the United States this year.1 2 Such heavy mobile usage ultimately accounted for 46% of all online video views in 2015, with the average American spending 76 minutes watching video per day.3
As mobile video consumption continues to expand, publishers are rapidly growing and improving their video content libraries to ensure their mobile properties offer the content users prefer.
Here are three best practices leading digital publishers are employing to get the most from their video content.
Keep it Short
As it pertains to mobile users, Ed O’Keefe, the managing editor at NowThis News explains, “You might have a 7–15 second lead-in to the story and you’d watch the graph just precipitously fade off as people were bailing until the story started. So that influenced early on in terms of editing—you know, get to the story quickly.”4
Steve Schiffman, General Manager of Video at the Washington Post, agrees stating, “Our research would suggest that our [mobile] consumers, interested in news and information, want a shorter video.”5
Research from Ooyalah substantiates NowThis and the Washington Post; viewers spend significantly less time watching digital video as the screen size shrunk from television, to computer, to tablet, to phone. In short, the bigger the screen, the more time a viewer is willing to spend watching.6
Consider the Video Format
Because a smartphone does not adhere well with the horizontal rectangular format of a desktop or television, vertical video is being used with more frequency. One leading example is Snapchat, whose vertical videos receive a whopping 10 billion daily views from its millennial audience.7
And while it’s too early to see direct consumption results, from an advertising perspective, vertical video ads placed before vertical videos do see higher engagement results than normal horizontal preroll video ads.
Hearst’s CRO Todd Haskell explained, “For advertisers looking to reach a millennial audience, they recognize that they should do so in a manner that will drive the strongest engagement. For millennials who are mainly consuming content via a mobile device, that is very clearly vertical.”8
Additionally, vertical video ads see far greater levels of view-through rates; Snapchat reports that vertical video ads have up to nine times more completed views than horizontal video ads.9
If a Tree Falls in a Forest…
While spend on programmatic video ads is expected to reach $5.37 billion in 2016—almost double that of 2015, an audience is, naturally, needed to get a slice of the pie.10
Jordan Bitterman, Chief Strategy Officer at Mindshare, expressed that when it comes to video, “It certainly helps you plan more when you know you have a built-in audience that’s going to drive a steady amount of viewership. We don’t necessarily want to advertise around just virility.”11
But this may require time and optimization. Pete Spande, CRO of Business Insider expresses, “For publishers, video is like text: there are hits as well as underperformers.” The key is to keep at it and improve the product based on continued learnings.”12
The winning formula for mobile video? A strategy that considers its duration, format, and audience.
1. Abramovich, Giselle. “15 Stats Brands Should Know About Online Video.” Digiday. N.p., 02 Apr. 2013. Web. 15 July 2016.
2. “U.S. Mobile Phone Video Viewers 2019.” Statista. N.p., 2016. Web. 15 July 2016.
3. Peterson, Tim. “Brands Take (Long) Wait-and-See Approach to Mobile Video.” Advertising Age. N.p., 04 June 2015. Web. 15 July 2016.
4. Kross, Kathryn. “Good Video Content: What’s Working for News Publishers.” American Press Institute RSS. N.p., 05 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 July 2016.
5. Kross, Kathryn. “Good Video Content: What’s Working for News Publishers.” American Press Institute RSS. N.p., 05 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 July 2016.
6. IBID
7. Liyakasa, Kelly. “Publishers Take A Cue From Snapchat With Vertical Video, But Will Advertisers Bite? | AdExchanger.” AdExchanger ICal. N.p., 02 May 2016. Web. 15 July 2016.
8. IBID
9. Blattberg, Eric. “It’s Time to Take Vertical Video Seriously.” Digiday. N.p., 05 Apr. 2015. Web. 15 July 2016.
10. “More Than Two-Thirds of US Digital Display Ad Spending Is Programmatic.” EMarketer. N.p., 05 Apr. 2016. Web. 15 July 2016.
11. Bilton, Ricardo. “Digital Publishers Chase Video with Mixed Results.” Digiday. N.p., 06 Mar. 2014. Web. 15 July 2016.
12. IBID