Fixing Ad Viewability: A Simple And Unacceptable Solution

On A Clear Day, I'm Getting Hosed

Item: In Q1 2015, view- ability rates for online ads on networks and exchanges, which is to say all non-direct digital ad inventory, which pretty much means a vast amount of programmatic and RTB placements, was...

(drumroll please)

41.8%.

Down from Q4's 42.6%.

Which means over 5 out of every 9 ads, ads that are presumably bought and paid for by advertisers, are never seen by a human.

(Source: Integral Ads Media Quality Report.)

The scary part of it is that the report is actually "good" news, in that the numbers are up about 5% from the worst numbers of 2014, with mobile and video viewability leading the charge. Mobile wins on this metric because it's downright difficult for ads within an app to not be viewable. Video wins because it's expensive enough to avoid the truly awful remnant inventory part of the market. Direct sales to publishers also score higher than exchanges and networks, which should surprise you not at all, and have only a quarter of the ad fraud issues.

Some of those unseen ad impressions are legitimate, of course. White hat robots are how search engines work. Not every ad impression in offline realms are viewable, especially in print. There's a very real possibility that viewability numbers for other ad mediums aren't so much better than, well, 4 out of 9.

But since you can measure digital, and watching just one video of a black hat machine in operation can make you crazy with rage, all of this smells of Capital F Fraud. So it's the hot button story for 2015, and the major threat facing the industry today.

Now, ready for the truly bad news?

The industry defines a viewable ad impression as one where the ad is at least 60% on screen, and resides there for over one second.

Does that seem viewable to you, Dear Reader?

Publishers and ad exchanges, of course, have a vested interest in not ratcheting up the standards, because it's just an added measure of self-punishment. But this is just not a sustainable product and standard, especially if you are trying to argue for any kind of branding benefit. Your ad was half on the screen, for the time it took you to blink your eyes three times. Pay up.

There's just one way out for this, and it's a brand of medicine that no one wants to take, but it's just this.

Fraud, and robots, never, ever move as slowly as people.

If viewability is defined as not 1, but 10, seconds on the screen, you will more or less end the issue. You'd also have a product that businesses and advertisers will want to buy. But the ad would have to stay around even on screen scroll and pan, which means that publishers would have to change their ways to accommodate it.

Finally, you'd have all kinds of legitimate traffic fail to register as an impression, because humans can, and do, reject content in less than ten seconds. (By the way, if they do, and it means the death of a lot of bad content sites? I think the world would be a better place, and we might see less clickbait or slideshow garbage. But I digress.)

Oh, and the CPMs involved would have to more or less multiply by a factor of 10.

Easier to just talk about native and mobile, right?

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.