OutStream Video Ads Best Practices: for Publishers

Everyone has come across outstream video ads and are just unsure of what they are. The easiest instance would be the muted videos that appear out of nowhere when you’re reading a cool article on say Forbes or Cosmopolitan or such. The simplest way to explain it is video ads that live outside video players. Their placements necessarily are “out of stream”  that is- video ad placements that do not have an accompanying video. This includes a very large variety of formats and depends on the screens used too.  Their popularity and demand are increasing exponentially simply because they bring in additional revenue without the need for any video content. It is the best approach if you wish to expand your video ad campaign beyond the video player. We have discussed outstream video ads at length in this article.

OutStream Ads Best Practices: A Guide for Publishers

There are certain practices and industry standards that people adhere to witness effectively higher CPMs from outstream video ad formats. We have listed some of the best ones that you could follow-

  • These should necessarily be identified as advertisements and as a publisher, you should know about ad attribution.
  • Other than interstitials and rewarded placements, autoplay out-stream video ad placements, must be muted by default unless the user specifically calls for it to be unmuted.
  • Audio can be enabled or disabled on initial load, for interstitial placements and is dependent on the user’s phone settings. For example, if an interstitial load when the user’s phone is sound off, the interstitial must load in a muted state.
  • Out-stream video ads other than interstitials may begin playing only when at least 50% of the pixels in the player are visible in the viewport and must stop playing when fewer than 50% of the pixels in the player are visible in the viewport unless the user has interacted with the play button in the video ad controls.
  • They cannot lead to the reflow of the page’s layout before, during, or after the video ad renders and essentially, the placement must not shift the content up or down in the user’s viewport, neither must the placement expand to full screen on scroll over.
  • Except for interstitials, out-stream video ad placements must scroll along with the other content in the app or page and there must be no sticky implementations of out-stream ads.
  • The in-article ads must be placed such that they stay between paragraphs, and in-feed ads must be placed within a feed of items.
  • Ad Manager offers many different ad formats for outstream video ads.
  • Google-provides out-stream solutions and ensures that your policy is compliant with these requirements for certain ad formats like- in-article, in-feed, and native video and more.
  • The formats that put you in the position to control the player’s behaviour need you to comply with the above industry-standard practices.

Outstream video ads are a great choice and help publishers who have no video content on their websites so much. It is a major help with expansion and is also coherent with your website and almost provides a native-like look. There are more such articles on video ads and their optimization tools. Feel free to check them out.

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Looking to Increase your Ad Revenue: Get in touch with me for a personalised consultation and increase your ad revenue across native, display, video (instream and outstream), in-app and other verticals. I also assist in customized DFP setup, header bidding, and content creation strategy. My skype id is: ronniedey. Feel free to connect!