Future of Video Advertising and Impatient Viewer

Studies have discovered that, the benefits of traditional online advertisement are decreasing nowadays. In contrast, according to longer display time and higher charge rate, video advertising attracts media companies’ interests. However, we still have challenges in video advertising. A research work in University of Massachusetts, Amherst is the first to establish a causal relationship between video quality and viewer behavior. http://people.cs.umass.edu/~ramesh/Site/HOME_files/imc208-krishnan.pdf

Suggested by Prof. Ramesh Sitaraman, video viewer’s patience has been declined, along with the development of network quality of service, e.g. higher bandwidth, lower latency, etc. This conclusion is derived from two research work:

In 2006, Jupiter Research concluded a “4-second rule” based on interviewing 1,058 online shoppers (http://www.akamai.com/4seconds). It states that an average online shopper is likely to abandon a web site if a web page does not download in 4 seconds.

However, in February 2012, Steve Lohr published a new study result in New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-users-flee-slow-loading-sites.html), implies that the users have become impatient over time and that even a 400 ms delay can make users search less.

Motivated by this comparison, Prof. Ramesh Sitaraman’s team works on deriving analogous rules for streaming where startup delay for video is roughly analogous to download time for web pages.

As a result of data analysis on extensive traces from Akamai’s streaming network that include 23 million views from 6.7 million unique viewers, the researchers claim that viewers start to abandon a video if it takes more than 2 seconds to start up, with each incremental delay of 1 second resulting in a 5.8% increase in the abandonment rate. Further, they show that a moderate amount of interruptions can decrease the average play time of a viewer by a significant amount. A viewer who experiences a rebuffer delay equal to 1% of the video duration plays 5% less of the video in comparison to a similar viewer who experienced no rebuffering. Finally, they show that a viewer who experienced failure is 2.32% less likely to revisit the same site within a week than a similar viewer who did not experience a failure.

Even thought the research result is not surprising, it can be a reference for developing online video marketing and video advertising. Especially for video advertising, to determine the video quality and display length for impatient viewers to maximize the advertising effects is still a critical challenge.