Here’s a hard truth for publishers: If you aren’t taking advantage of video advertising, it’s going to be difficult to survive the next five or ten years. Why? Because everyone’s doing it. And audiences are loving it, meaning digital video ads are paying off big for publishers.

A few years ago, that might not have been the case, but times have changed. In 2020, an estimated 82 percent of all web traffic from consumers involved video.

With numbers like that, you’d think all publishers would jump on the video advertising train as fast as possible. That hasn’t exactly happened. Many publishers are still holding out in the familiar comfort of text, images and other mediums. What’s stopping them? Why is video advertising so hard for publishers?

That’s exactly what we examine in this post, so keep reading. Whether you aren’t doing video at all or are doing video that isn’t performing the way you’d like, Playwire can help you create video that gets results. Reach out to the video ad experts at Playwire. 

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Benefits of Video Advertising for Publishers

First, let’s look a little harder at why publishers should be putting time into video advertising. 

Here are a few key benefits:

  • Increased time on site. It’s true — people love to watch videos. They engage with them. Videos don’t ask as much of a viewer as text asks of a reader or a game asks of a player. More time on your site means more engagement with your content and, importantly, more impressions.
  • A more dynamic brand personality. Who or what is your brand? Does the text on your site make it as clear as a video would? Probably not. One-dimensional text content can tell a story, but a video tells the same story — at a thousand words per minute it is great for brand awareness.
  • Better SEO. Google and the other major search engines have been shifting to a heavier focus on video and visual content for years. There is no sign that text content is going to have a resurgence in the search engine rankings, either. Put simply, Google likes to see publishers posting videos, and it rewards them with better search rankings.
  • Higher CPMs. Money matters. A typical CPM for an outstream video player is between 5-6x the typical CPM for a standard banner ad.

Now, let’s get into the challenges of online video advertising for publishers, as well as a solution.

Video Feels Overwhelming for Publishers

For many publishers, video is the great unknown — the deep, scary pit that’s hungry for cash, time and manpower. These are the publishers who tend to stay in the race to the bottom that display banner ads have become.

It’s understandable. Publishing is a hard game, and coming out in the black is tough enough without adding the stress of building an entirely new team to create video content. 

But amid the explosive growth of video content and ads all over the web, video-production partners who actually know what they’re doing are ready and willing to lend a hand. Video ad experts, who also help with online video content creation, can help publishers who feel overwhelmed by the thought of breaking into video advertisement.

Publishers Worry That Video Will Take Too Many Resources

Making videos is expensive, right? Sure. It can be. And that’s why many publishers are resisting video as hard as they can. Publishers have to be cautious with their money and other resources if they want to stay profitable.

However, online videos come with serious ROI for many publishers. Consider these two statistics from Wordstream:

  • The average conversion rate for websites not using video is 2.9%. For those that do use video, it’s 4.8%.
  • Compared to pages with no videos, landing pages that contain videos are 53% more likely to show up on the first page of search engine results.

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    The Complete Video Advertising Resource Center

The Vocal Minority Stands in the Way of Video

Publishers work hard to build their audiences. In many cases, publishers’ audiences are tight-knit communities of people who have loved the publisher’s content for years. And when that content changes, they have opinions — strong ones.

This is what happens when some publishers add video to their production regimen: A few vocal users complain loudly. And that scares the publisher. If their longtime users don’t like video, they fear that they risk their hard-won user base.

The engagement numbers simply don’t support that idea. When publishers add videos, engagement metrics go up almost across the board. We’ve seen it dozens of times at Playwire, but don’t just take it from us. According to Wordstream, combining video with ads can boost user engagement by as much as 22%.

UX Concerns Are a Barrier to Video Advertising

One of the biggest challenges of video advertising for publishers is the concern that video will crash their site metrics. That concern stems from the common notion that videos and video players are code-heavy, leading to slow load times and other Core Web Vitals concerns.

On top of that, publishers worry that problems like slow load times, video popups and loud autoplay videos will ruin their site’s user experience (UX). 

These concerns were all mostly based in reality several years ago. But this simply isn’t the case anymore. Video partners have developed lightweight video players. Players are mostly built with audio to be user-initiated, or start with the mute button already pushed. What’s more, well-built sites load content first and videos last to preserve site speed metrics.

You Have Video, But It Isn’t Working

What if you already have video on your site — whether through a video provider or your own in-house team — and it simply isn’t generating the revenue it should? This happens to publishers all the time, and there are a few key reasons for it.

Many video monetization providers automate the delivery of videos to your site — they scan the content and serve up something that is “related” in some way to the content. The result is often a video that doesn’t really make sense to show with the piece of content you have created.

Alternatively, what if your viewership and engagement with your content decreased after you implemented a video widget? If that’s the case, check how many ads are playing before your video content. Keep in mind that the average user stays on a website for less than a minute. If you have more than a minute of ads before your content, your users may not actually be seeing your content.

To combat these issues, Playwire works with an in-house video production team that can create custom videos to fit your content. While we prioritize revenue for publishers, we always keep UX in mind so you don’t lose your target audience.

Additionally, quality video content can be repurposed across other video-first platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, leading to the type of cross-platform engagement that text alone could never generate. A content strategy that encompasses video becomes a win for social media revenue as well as website revenue.

The Solution: Get Help with Video Advertising

For publishers, the challenges of video advertising form an enormous barrier to true entry into the online video ad game. This is unfortunate because the benefits of overcoming these challenges can be immense.

Even those publishers who have broken into the video ad format often find themselves working with a subpar video partner. Bad videos are just as bad as no videos, unfortunately — and they waste a lot more resources.

The team at Playwire is here to help video publishers get to where they want to be. 

Our Trendi™ video player is designed to solve video ad revenue challenges while promoting great UX. We can even provide engaging, custom, vertical-specific video content, so all you have to do is plug in a single line of code and let us do the work.

To learn more about Trendi™ or Playwire’s other revenue amplification solutions, give us a call at 1-561-206-4621 or contact us online.

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