New Ways to Show Ads

A few things stood out to me today in The Wall Street Journal story about YouTube trying out ads on videos, and they spell really good and really scary news for advertisers. The video advertisements are the ones that sit, superimposed, as a "lower third" – lower fifth, really – on the video, and the ad only shows if the viewer clicks. According to the article.

- A whopping 75% of viewers who clicked on the ad (the FT makes that clear) watched the entire ad. So once viewers are engaged, they're engaged

- The ads have 5-10 times greater clickthrough than regular display ads. That's also huge.

But terrifying for the current way ads are shown is that 70% of viewers abandoned videos with pre-roll ads. That's a LOT of lost eyeballs and means advertisers will have to be creative in how they offer ads. It's really becoming a partnership, an offer, rather than the kind of interruptive (watch this ad to see this content) model we've had in a linear world.

It also caught my attention – and made me want the answer – that YouTube wouldn't say what percentage of its videos come from content partners.