The most surprising outcome from The FreeWheel Video Monetization Q4 2015 webinar this week suggests that Europe is missing out on a huge proportion of advertising opportunities in live video events compared to the US. It’s not such a surprising conclusion for a programmatic advertising player who is trying to break down doors across Europe.
FreeWheel’s results showed that live video views only accounted for 0.3% of all ad views in Europe during Q4 2015, compared to in the US where live video made up 26% of all ad views. FreeWheel states that programmers in Europe are more focused on long form monetization, often beefing up their ad breaks to linear standards.
In addition, in the US, long form content (over 20 minutes) accounted for 48% of ad views, short form (0-5 minutes) 26%, and mid form (5-20 minutes) just 3%. In Europe, long form was the dominating content for ad views during Q4 2015, with 88%, short form was 7%, and mid form was 4%.
We followed up our queries about this unexpected difference in live ad views between the US and Europe with co-author of the report Brian Dutt, who told us, “the distinction is that in Europe the ads you are seeing are (for the most part) pre-stitched, meaning that they are either passed through from whatever is happening in linear or pre-scheduled. They are not ad served through dynamic ad insertion in real-time (i.e. every person potentially seeing a different ad).”
We also asked if illegal streaming of live sports could be an influencing factor in these figures, and if this is something that FreeWheel monitors, Dutt responded, “I can’t really speak to illegal live streaming, although I wouldn’t be surprised if that plays somewhat of a role (it’s less of an issue in the US where cable/satellite penetration is very high and most people already have access to the sports channels).”
The findings Freewheel wants to shout from the rooftop aren’t really all that different from previous reports within the last year. The on-going trend is that OTT devices such as Apple TV and Roku are surging, and Freewheel’s data shows that 22% of all ad views now occur on these devices. This has grown from less than 10% compared to last year – an impressive growth, but one that has been a long time coming.
Desktops and laptops still make up the majority of ad views with 40%, and smartphones are in third place with 19%, followed by set tops and tablets with 10% and 9%, respectively.
Apple TV came out on top with almost half of all ad views across the OTT device ecosystem with 44%, followed by Roku with 34%, gaming consoles with 15%, Chromecast with 5%, and Amazon and Smart TVs both with 1%.
Strangely, FreeWheel didn’t report these same figures for OTT device ad view share in the previous quarter’s report, but looking back at the Q2 report we can see that this was when Roku was knocked off the top spot by Apple TV with 39% of the total OTT device ad view market in this period. Interestingly, in figures that FreeWheel hasn’t reported, we can see that ad views on Chromecast have slipped 6% in this two quarter period, and Smart TVs have dropped 2%.
Furthermore, from Q2 to Q4 2015, ad views on Apple TV have increased 5%, Roku up 2%, gaming consoles up 4%, and Amazon up 0.9%.
Compared to Q4 2014, the same period this year saw impressive growth across screens, content and distribution channels – overall video views increased 32% and ad views increased 30% over one year, figures which are naturally expected to go hand in hand. With this year on year increase, Q4 saw a huge 129% growth in ad views on live video content, as well as a 56% increase in long form ad views, and 11% for short form.
Additional findings from the report show that ads from TV Everywhere services were up 142%, making up 65% of all long form ad views. However, programmatic ads still only account for 5% of content inventories – FreeWheel is a programmatic buying specialist, along with Black Arrow, thePlatform, and SeaChange in the US, as well as Vubiquity in the UK.
FreeWheel compiles its Video Monetization reports by collecting data from 160 billion video views.
A separate report from Strategy Analytics this week (see elsewhere in this issue) finds that Google’s Chromecast is still the overall market leader in OTT device shipments during 2015. The Global Connected TV Device Vendor Market Share Q4 2015 report shows that Chromecast has shipped 27 million units in just two and a half years, and is closing in on Apple TV’s 37 million units shipped since its launch in 2007. Roku’s Box and Streaming Stick shipped 20 million units, and Amazon Fire TV less than 10 million.