A lot has changed in the past few years—Donald Trump thinks he’s a politician, Kanye loves someone other than himself, and clicking an ad no longer opens a floodgate of popups. Until recently, established brands focused advertising budgets on outdated and intrusive formats like banners and layer ads. And while ad formats of the past can still convert visitors into paying customers (Trump is still sporting a combover, isn’t he?), brands can accomplish so much more by capitalizing on progressive advertising practices, like video monetization.
Learning the basics of content monetization
Put simply, content monetization is exactly what it sounds like—making money from the content that exists on your website or app. We’re not here to lecture you on the benefits of this marketing practice, we know it’s not entirely groundbreaking and has been around for quite some time. After all, it’s been nearly 20 years since Bill Gates first exclaimed, “Content is King.”
Even so, brands often forget that content monetization involves digitizing all forms of online content. If your mind wanders straight to premium content like whitepapers, online courses, and ebooks, you’re not wrong. But you are neglecting an integral part of the practice—that is, interactive and video solutions. As it’s quickly becoming common knowledge that interactive and video advertising bring back the highest click through rates and revenue opportunities, it’s becoming harder to defend the throne of Paypal accounts and downloadable PDFs.
While the marketing world is just now grasping the value of video monetization, we’re not surprised the practice is finally gaining traction. The most outstanding statistic perhaps is that video advertisements boast the highest click-through rate of all digital ad formats—a whopping 1.84%. In comparison, you’re more likely to survive a plane crash than to click a banner ad. As the popularity of video advertisements grow, it’s difficult to choose the best video monetization platform—YouTube is so yesterday.
Why are video advertisements so clickable
First off, they’re memorable. The average person views 1700 banner ads per month, but try to remember even one! On the other hand, video advertisements do an excellent job of penetrating your sensory memory. This is because it both stands out against common, mundane ads, and also evokes emotional impact—two key factors that should always determine your ad monetization strategy. All in all, the combination of audio and visual is an effective way to grab and more importantly, keep the viewer’s attention.
Second of all, video advertisements are amazingly suited for mobile, an industry that has exploded in the last couple of years. And for good reason: by 2018, 38% of the United States will be viewing videos on their smartphones and 45% on their tablets. If we didn’t know any better, it would seem that video advertisements were almost made for mobile. Because video ads take up the entire mobile screen, viewers are forced to watch it and are left without the choice to wait the ad out, open another tab, and distract themselves with cat videos.
It gives more meaning to completion rates, which some marketers argue are not the best measure of user engagement as it doesn’t ensure that the video was actually watched. Additionally, mobile video ads can be pre-cached, meaning they load ahead of time so they can play automatically. The user experience is much more seamless and enjoyable. For this reason, Webyclip and other interactive video tools seem to be the future of video marketing.
In short, video advertising offers endless possibilities for both innovation and increasing revenue, providing brands an entirely new angle to approach a trade that has been around since the Pyramids. While video monetization is still in its early stages, we’re excited to see how the industry progresses.
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