For media publishers, content monetization is their bread and butter. The most active programmatic sell side pioneers are large news portals. They push the search for new engagement boosting formats, based on their need for user attention. Header bidding platforms have emerged as powerful tools to maximize ad revenue.

Even, East-European press services with the sufficient funding have started video press releases production. No need to mention, the bigger the competition on the market is, the more motivated publishers are to respond to new tendencies dynamically.

Choose life, choose video

US news portal “for young people” Mic.com has recently announced the wave of staff cuts. They decided to say goodbye to writers, while planning to move forward to visual journalism. And they explained the decision based on their millennial audience expectations, which met its criticism.

Analysts say thirst for video was never about audience needs, it’s all about getting ad revenue. If users wanted that much video content, there wouldn’t be any need for autoplay.

Whatever the reason – either millennials really want to get their quick and vivid info by means of video, or they get caught with the attention grabbing techniques – the rates of video ads consumption are high. Video has the highest CPM of any digital ad format. Thus, it will keep on luring the investments.

Video – good, Header Bidding – good

We’ve talked about the positiveness that header bidding brings to the industry a buzzillian times before.

There are obvious arguments in favour of HB:

• Publishers can sell their inventory for higher bids from smaller players.
• Shorter load time thanks to bypassing the server.
• After an auction happens, your browser stores info on winner bids.

Header Bidding is a big thing, but it remains a bit unclear for many. Currently, the technology is generally used for display ad buying. And the potential revenue from video header bidding option remains “unsolicited”. The reason is as simple as technical complexity.

New and different options require human resources, tech capacities and, which is not the least, a comprehensive understanding.

Some say video header bidding is not possible because there’s no header in a video. HB is about sending Javascript command to server for getting video ad from it.

Flash video players are not javascripted, so HB won’t work for them. It is possible in theory to make manual settings for calling the server and getting an ad into Flash video player back. This, however, is a bit overcomplicated. Good thing is that Flash video players are losing their popularity. Most video players are pieces of Javascript within the page.

Proper implementation of video header bidding solution is possible and it promises smaller latency with higher revenue.

Admixer has offered ad delivery into HTML5 video players for a long time now. And at the moment, we are busy with our video header bidding implementation solution. We’re hoping for interesting future collaborations with publishers that are open for tech innovations in monetization options. Let’s see what the future brings for video monetization together.