Akamai Stays In the Ad Game With Video Insertion Product

Content-distribution network Akamai sold its Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS) business to Mediamath earlier this year. Many assumed the move marked the end of Akamai’s involvement in the ad business. Not so.

Soon after it auctioned off its ADS assets, Akamai focused on video ads when it launched its Ad Integration Services in February. Part of the company’s Sola Vision suite, the Ad Integration Services inserts targeted ads from multiple ad-decisioning or ad-network platforms into video streams.

“While Akamai sold our ADS business to Mediamath in January, we continue to help content owners and advertisers deliver online video ads through offerings such as our Ad Integration Services, as it is a natural extension of our content delivery capabilities,” said Akamai spokesperson Chris Nicholson.

Now Akamai may be moving into a new phase of marketing those products. Based on data from Sola Analytics, it published a study today on video ad-viewing patterns. The company analyzed 367 million videos and 257 million ads from more than 3,000 publishers that were viewed by 65 million unique users worldwide.

Among its findings: Viewers are 18.1% more likely to finish watching an ad that appears halfway through the video than a pre-roll ad, and pre-roll ads are 14.3% more likely to be completed than a post-roll ad. Viewers are more tolerant of video ads than of slow-loading videos. Viewers who must wait 10 seconds for their video to load are three times more likely to abandon it than users who spend the same amount time watching a pre-roll ad.

In addition, one-third of the viewers who abandon a video leave at or before the quarter-way mark, and two-thirds at or before the halfway mark. Ads that play within long-form content such as TV episodes and movies are 87% more likely to be completed than those that play in short-form content such as news clips and sports highlights (67%).

Akamai is scheduled to announce its Q3 2013 results tomorrow. The company has reported high growth in its content distribution business as consumers continue to stream videos, shop and play online games on the Web. For the second quarter, Akamai reported revenues and operating margins at the high end of its guidance, which it attributed to strong traffic growth and a rising demand for its IP accelerator solutions.

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