We set out with a simple question: what percent of unique visitors to a media company's homepage will end up watching a pre-roll video ad? Many people visit a broadcaster's site for reasons other than watching full-length episodes or clips, for instance, such as checking to see when new episodes will air or reading show gossip on forums, and pre-roll advertising likely misses these people.

Few sites or publishers publicly disclose this data, so we turned to TubeMogul's video analytics, which tracks on-site data for hundreds of media companies spanning billions of monthly streams, to get closer to an answer.

Methodology

For a 14-day period, we tracked unique homepage visits and resulting video views for a large sample of media companies, including top television broadcasters, print publications and online media outlets. Views hailed from anywhere within the publisher's site; views from off-site embeds were excluded. The sample only includes publishers that are monetizing video through pre-roll advertising. We quantified visits by limiting the sample to sites with video players embedded somewhere on their homepage, logging every time a unique visitor loaded the player on the homepage and then watched -- or did not watch -- a full pre-roll video ad throughout the site.

Results

Overall, 13.1% of unique visitors to a media company's homepage end up watching a pre-roll ad, on average. By category:

Analysis/Conclusions

The data presents a pretty clear tradeoff to video advertisers: in reaching a premium audience on a given site, pre-roll advertising can only get you so far, especially in certain categories. If an advertiser wants to reach an entire site's audience with a given video ad, in-banner display or interstitial advertising could be complementary additions to increase reach.


Works Cited:

• TubeMogul's patent-pending video tracking technology.
• TubeMogul's partners.
  

In the interests of full disclosure:

• TubeMogul sells both pre-roll and in-banner video advertising, although this study is agnostic to what publisher or advertising network, platform or service actually served the ads.