Publisher technology company Yieldex has introduced a new set of features to help publishers forecast the viewability of their inventory, which could in turn help provide guarantees to advertisers that only want to buy viewable impressions.
Publishers want to do the right thing, and they are collectively trying to tell the market, ‘It’s not a walk in the park.’
sherrill mane, IAB
The Yieldex platform, used by publishers like The Globe and Mail, can now work with viewability data collected by the publisher’s ad server to report on how many viewable impressions a publisher has available to sell, and project important metrics like viewable rate and viewable cost-per-thousand (vCPM) on different pages or placements of their sites.
With this data in hand, publishers are closer to being able to guarantee advertisers that a minimum percentage of the inventory they buy will be viewable. Although few publishers have yet been able to offer deals where advertisers only pay for viewable impressions, it’s becoming more common for advertisers to contractually require that 70% or more of the inventory they buy be viewable.
“The publisher is selling into the future. They’re making a sale a month or two out, sometimes as far as a year out, saying ‘I guarantee that I will deliver to you one million impressions, and out of that, 700,00 will actually be viewable,'” explained Anita Khosla, Yieldex VP engineering. “When you’re planning that far out, you need to have a tool to understand what you have left to sell.”
In recent weeks, tensions have been growing between advertisers and publishers over the slow progress publishers have made towards offering these kinds of viewability guarantees, and the large amount of non-viewable inventory that advertisers are still finding in their campaigns. At an IAB townhall session last week in Phoenix, reported by Digiday, publishers and agencies argued over who was responsible for holding back the transition to the viewable impression as the standard currency for online ad buying.
“I was talking about viewability in 2011. Now it’s 2015 … This is the year that people have to get their shit together,” Julian Zilberbrand, ZenithOptimedia executive vice-president, reportedly told the audience.
At the heart of the conflict is the fact that more than half of online ads sold today (56%, according to Google’s latest estimate) doesn’t meet the industry standard of having at least 50% of their area on-screen for at least one second. Advertisers only want to pay for impressions that human viewers have a chance to see, but with so much inventory out-of-view, transitioning to a model where only viewable impressions are sold means a major blow to publishers’ revenues.
Publishers have been struggling to increase the volume of viewable inventory on their websites, by changing the placement and size of their ads, speeding up ad load times, and moving to responsive ad serving.
Still, those that have been able to offer viewability guarantees have had to increase their rates to make up for revenue lost from reduced sales volume – another point of friction in the debate.
“There is incredible pain and confusion out there,” Sherrill Mane, the U.S. IAB’s SVP of research and measurement, told the Wall Street Journal in a recent article about the “nightmare” publishers face with viewability. “Publishers want to do the right thing, and they are collectively trying to tell the market, ‘It’s not a walk in the park.’”
Adding to the difficulty is a lack of tools to determine which inventory can be sold as viewable and which is worthless. Major discrepancies between MRC-accredited viewability measurement providers have been reported, making it difficult for publishers and advertisers to even agree on viewability reports. And since viewability is a performance metric, reported after a campaign has been delivered, it’s difficult to predict the viewability of a given tranche of inventory beforehand – which means offering a contractual viewability guarantees can be a gamble for publishers.
Yieldex is one of the publisher-side technology companies working to fix that problem. With its new features, publishers can get a more reliable idea of what they have to sell and what rates they can offer to meet their revenue targets.
“We’re arming them with data that will help them make the smartest decisions,” said Khosla. “If one of area of your site has very high viewability and you have a buyer wanting a guarantee against viewable inventory… you can make sure that viewable inventory goes to the buyer that requires a guarantee, versus the one who doesn’t.”
So far the service is only available to clients that use Google DoubleClick for Publishers. Khosla said that DFP has been one of only a few ad servers to collect viewability data directly, and that Yieldex plans to integrate with other ad servers as they begin to do the same.
