Largest Scientific Study on Effectiveness of Online Video Advertising Presented at Internet Conference

University of Massachusetts Amherst presented a study on the effectiveness of video advertising as an economic, sustainable and profitable media platform. The study covered 275 million ads from in 367 million videos. With over 3,000 publishers and 65 million viewers, this study is the largest ever done on video advertising.

UMass researchers used Akamai's media analytics platform to study a 15 day period in April 2013 of anonymized viewer data to come up with their observation.

The study noted several factors such as the duration of the ad, where the ad is inserted, and viewer behavior while the ad is showing. It is even observed that weekend and evening viewing scored higher than regular days. Also, a 10 to 15 second fast loading video ad inserted in the middle of a video has a higher completion rate especially if the visitor is a repeat visitor on the site.

The findings of the study will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Internet Measurement Conference in Barcelona.

Online video is one of the largest source of internet traffic and companies like YouTube are taking advantage of the opportunities it presents for advertising.