With nearly all of our favorite websites now featuring video content, online video advertising is no longer a market for just YouTube and Hulu. The market for online video advertising, while young, is already enormous and it’s growing rapidly. Last year eMarketer forecasted that digital video ad spending will grow to $9.1 billion in 2017, and nearly one third of marketers are already shifting budget from online display and television advertising into online video ads, according to a 2013 study from Adap.tv and Digiday.

For publishers and advertisers there are still many challenges and questions about how to best capitalize on online video advertising. For example: What is the ideal duration for a video ad? What are some sophisticated ways to package video with traditional digital advertising to increase brand visibility?

To begin to answer these questions and gain insights into the online video advertising market, MediaRadar analyzed thousands of online video ads across more than 100 websites between November 2013 and January 2014. The study revealed some very interesting trends.

A few quick takeaways:

While the vast majority (79%) of online video ads are either 15 or 30 seconds long, 30 second ads are about 10 times more likely to have a skip option than 15 second ads. Perhaps counter-intuitively, shorter ads can deliver more brand messaging than longer ads.
When it comes to the high-impact packaging of online video with various forms of display and rich media ads, there are opportunities to be an early adopter within certain categories. While 52% of video ads on food websites are accompanied by display ads, just 11% of ads on tech sites also feature an accompanying display ad.

The findings are summarized in the infographic below:

AAM’s “Digital Insights” white paper series shares our findings from recent AAM research to shed some light on the challenges and opportunities media companies are facing in today’s digital landscape. The third paper, “From Chaos to Credibility,” addresses the issues with media measurement and focuses on some potential solutions. Here’s a preview of what we found:

The methods used to track users’ media engagement and activities are just as varied and fragmented as the devices themselves. A quarter of publishers use two or more solutions to evaluate user interactions with their content. The multiple options, solutions and methodologies for tracking user engagement contribute to the fragmentation challenges of digital measurement and lead to lack of standardized metrics in mobile.

In our research we also heard a clear desire for industry-wide collaboration for definitions and standards that all digital media could use to create a level playing field. The number of associations and vendors working toward solutions is just as fragmented as other areas of the digital arena. As an independent third party, AAM is able to maintain a neutral presence with numerous groups. There is a lot of collaboration happening in our industry and AAM is proud to share our members’ voices and gain feedback during these discussions.

Setting those guidelines and standards is the first step to bring order and comparability to digital media. The next critical phase is independent, third-party verification and timely reporting of data. Audits help ensure everyone is on the same page when buying and selling digital media. For buyers, it takes the guesswork out of the equation and provides confidence in the product. It ensures reliability because even if the data is sourced from different vendors, it still has to pass the rigorous inspection of an audit. And it ensures accountability among all participants in the process — vendors, publishers and buyers. As we come together as an industry to set standards across each channel and then agree to audits of those channels to provide confidence and comparability for buyers and sellers alike.

See how we can move as an industry from chaos to credibility in our infographic:

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Infographic: Online Video Advertising Insights

Infographic: From Chaos to Credibility