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I was working on code to serve & track videos last night so this is a little late, but rise of video has little to do w/reader behavior...
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Digital media is doing more video for a number of reasons, some forced, some illogical, some that make sense, some that are nonsense.
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The rise of video on Facebook and that platforms demand for video has a lot to do with it, but FB pushed video b/c it was seeking quality.
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It's harder to make a fake news video than a fake news article. There's also the idea that FB wants people sitting in the feed, but
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at the end of the day FB has failed to deliver promptly on the tools that would make video work for its UX: midroll and pre-downloading.
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Facebook isn't the only reason digital media pivoted to do more video. Though, there are a lot of forces at work.
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Another big one is that leadership sees larger CPMs for video over text, but doesn't account for larger production costs.
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Making video is expensive and part of the reason preroll was set higher than display pre-programmatic was b/c of that...
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But in the programmatic world executives didn't account for that and have to either drive down costs thru bad quality or underpaying crew.
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This is pretty awful because it means that, like all programmatic driven content, video is in a speedy race to the bottom.
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This is more disastrous than display b/c video has harder to minimize costs than writing does, but no one plans ahead so *shrug*
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Right now it is easier to make money on video, but it won't be. & it usually isn't, because publishers don't see production costs vs profits
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So much of the "success" of media's digital video is built on inaccurate metrics (like the Facebook debacle) or budgetary incompetence
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PS: Facebook prob wasn't lying on purpose. That gets us to the other reason why video is pushed so hard: it's hard to track properly.
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Unlike display, no one has decided on what the 'important' metric on video is or the standard to track it. So over-reporting is very common.
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In the same way selling on pageviews is about perpetuating the untruth that pageviews are engagement, the same with most video metrics.
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Finally, marketing agencies love video and push video ads on clients and publishers like crazy for a pretty simple reason: VPAID
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After years of attempting to create secure display, VPAID is basically loading a JS file into your site and letting it do whatever it wants.
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VPAID is the backbone of video monetization & it's incredibly slow, it's terrifyingly insecure, it's awful for UX. Agencies love it.
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In the programmatic world, ad agencies are increasingly useless, so they create profit & role for themselves by reselling tons of analytics
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That's why these ads have 20 different tracking pixels that all do the same thing. And you can put more tracking tools on VPAID than display
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So publishers create more video to satisfy the demand for additional places to put VPAID tags but that benefits no one but the middleman
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Video preroll is often broken, enrage consumers, are easier to ignore than display. Mostly because VPAID is an inherently unstable standard
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(Thanks IAB!)
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Most video preroll is bad for advertisers & publishers. But its great for agencies to keep their useless carcasses afloat.
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There are situations in which pivoting to video *does* make sense but they have little to do w/length of articles people are willing to read
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But even those situations, good video pivots, are hampered by the fact that VPAID is bad for web video and people are forced to use it.
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Ending on a fun fact: most of the code we use to serve preroll today is derived from an open source project built by The Onion
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(and by we, I mean almost everyone. Most video players on the web branch from videojs, which The Onion wrote a plugin for)