Publisher Best Practices for Native Auto-Play Video Monetization and Engagement

Did you know? 💡

In addition to Outbrain’s network of click-based content,  Outbrain now offers native auto-play video!

What is Native Auto-Play Video?

A native auto-play video is a new form content discovery offered by Outbrain. By opting in, your audiences can be served the safest, most premium video content from the top DSPs in the market. Different from the typical intrusive outstream video placements, our videos live natively within the Outbrain widgets at the end of content, allowing users to engage naturally once your content is fully consumed. Now even publishers that have an outstream video activities with other partners can benefit with an extra source of video revenue.

What are the publisher best practices for native auto-play video monetization and engagement?

When determining your native auto-play video strategies, your main goal should be balancing the highest possible CPMs and fill rates with a positive user experience.

There are five main contributors to optimizing your revenue.

1. Viewability – the higher the viewability of your video, the more eyeballs will see it. And the more attractive it will be to marketers.
2. Player Size – marketers are willing to pay top dollar for a larger experience. The more page attention their video can command, the more engaged their audience will be.
3. Content Quality – the current state of the union is that there is a shortage of video demand and a surplus of inventory. That being said, video marketers have the ability to be picky. Marketers want their videos associated with premium publishers and content, and for the price they are paying, they rightfully should. Average time spent on page is another indicator of an engaged audience which attracts more video demand and higher CPMs.
4. Device – we typically see desktop commanding higher CPMs than mobile devices. Most likely because video player sizes are larger.
5. AdOps – It’s important to test different CPM floors in order to maximize your fill rates. For example, a $5 floor at a 20% fill rate has a net RPM of $1 ($5 x 20% = $1). But if we lowered the floor to $4 and saw fill rate jump to 30%, that would be a net RPM of $1.20 ($4 x 30% = $1.2).

What does Outbrain’s Native Auto-Play Video look like?

Outbrain offers multiple stylistic video formats within your sites to help achieve unique business goals.

While any of these formats will be beneficial to your site and business goals, we recommend choosing the format that will generate the highest viewability with the largest player size. This will ensure you are fully optimized to earn the most revenue possible from Outbrain’s Native Video Discovery.

Why use Outbrain for Native Auto-Play video?

We offer a less intrusive video experience for your audience. All of our videos auto-play with a sound off and provide a closeout button to return to the normal widget layout. Adding our video requires no extra dev work from your end and all videos fire off of our JS code and can live natively within your widget container.

Additionally, our native video is:

• Beneficial for publishers that don’t have a ton of video content already
• Incremental revenues on top of native display, in-stream and outstream
• Less intrusive than instream and outstream – videos appear when the user is finished with content consumption and looking for something to engage with next
• Equipped with the ability to detect other video content on the page in order to not run in parallel with other competing videos

What about brand safety?

Finally, the most important part is that we take extra pride in ensuring that all of our video content is of the highest quality. That’s why we require all publishers to integrate our ads.txt lines which provide full transparency to all our advertisers. This guarantees that advertisers know where their videos are running and that there is no fraud. This creates the safest exchange in the marketplace and thus, the most desirable.

Additionally, we recently announced a partnership with Telaria Inc., the leading brand-safe video monetization software company, to be the exclusive video SSP for Outbrain premium publisher inventory. In Telaria, we have found a trusted partner who is equally focused on delivering the best user experience for our audiences and we are excited to be partnering with the industry leader in this endeavor.

Visit our Complete Guide to Online Video Advertising

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