Brian Weiss - Freestar https://freestar.com Publisher First Tue, 28 Feb 2023 15:10:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://freestar.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/cropped-Icon-32x32.png Brian Weiss - Freestar https://freestar.com 32 32 Trends in Programmatic Video Advertising 2023 https://freestar.com/trends-in-programmatic-video-advertising-2023/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trends-in-programmatic-video-advertising-2023 Tue, 28 Feb 2023 17:00:11 +0000 https://freestar.com/?p=16278

As one of Freestar’s industry experts in programmatic video, I have noticed several trends predicted to dominate the industry in 2023. These trends are expected to shape the future of programmatic video advertising and provide new opportunities for advertisers and publishers alike.

The first trend expected to take center stage in 2023 is the growing importance of data privacy. As consumers become increasingly concerned about using their personal data, brands and publishers must focus on providing transparent and secure data handling. This trend will lead to greater investment in technology that safeguards consumer data and ensures that programmatic video advertising is delivered in a privacy-friendly manner.

Another trend likely to emerge in 2023 is the continued growth of Connected TV (CTV) advertising. CTV is already a significant player in programmatic video, and this trend is expected to accelerate in the coming years. As more consumers turn to streaming services for their entertainment needs, advertisers must focus on delivering targeted, relevant ads on these platforms. This trend will require developing new tools and technologies that allow advertisers to reach CTV audiences effectively.

In addition to the growth of CTV, programmatic video advertising is also expected to become more interactive in 2023. As consumers increasingly expect a personalized, engaging advertising experience, advertisers must focus on delivering interactive video ads that allow consumers to interact with the content. This trend will require the development of new ad formats, such as shoppable video ads and interactive polls, that provide consumers with an immersive and engaging advertising experience.

Another trend likely to dominate the programmatic video industry in 2023 is the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. These technologies have already made significant strides in the programmatic advertising industry, and their use is expected to accelerate in the coming years. AI and machine learning will enable advertisers to deliver highly targeted ads customized to individual consumers’ preferences and behaviors. This trend will require developing new tools and technologies to process large amounts of data and deliver highly personalized advertising content.

Finally, the programmatic video industry will become more integrated in 2023. As more publishers and advertisers look to streamline their advertising operations, we can expect greater integration between programmatic video and other forms of digital advertising. This trend will require the development of new platforms and tools that allow publishers and advertisers to manage their advertising campaigns across multiple channels and platforms seamlessly.

In conclusion, the programmatic video industry is set to experience several significant trends in 2023. From data privacy to CTV advertising, interactive ads, and AI and machine learning, advertisers and publishers must stay ahead of the curve to fully take advantage of these trends. By embracing these trends and investing in developing new technologies, the programmatic video industry will continue to provide brands with the tools they need to reach their target audiences effectively.

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School of Hardknocks: Striking The Balance Between UX & Monetization https://freestar.com/school-of-hardknocks-striking-the-balance-between-ux-monetization/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=school-of-hardknocks-striking-the-balance-between-ux-monetization https://freestar.com/school-of-hardknocks-striking-the-balance-between-ux-monetization/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2021 01:23:08 +0000 https://freestar.com/?p=3599 By: Brian Weiss, Yield Manager

We decided to start off this blog with a little walk down memory lane. For those of our publishers who have been in the game for over a decade, this will bring back both nostalgia and painful memories. This industry has come a long way.

Brian’s Story:

It was October 2012 and I was age 20 with a website generating upwards of 220,000 video views per day from an organic audience I’d spent a half-decade developing when pre-roll video ads were first introduced into my revenue stream. In those days, organizing my display advertising “waterfall” (also referred to as daisy chain) took up the majority of my mornings. 

So when my primary ad network (Break Media, RIP) brought me a pre-roll video campaign with a fixed $6.50 CPM and no frequency caps or limits, you can guess what happened.

My site EvilChili.com circa 2012, 120k avg unique visitors, right before I got my first taste of in-stream pre-roll revenue. 


Despite having grown a large user base of over 50,000 members, I didn’t think twice about having one 30-second pre-roll video ad run per video, even though many of the clips were under 1 minute in length.

“Early on, I didn’t have the discipline to maintain the balance between user experience and monetization.”

It was an incredibly lucrative time in my 20’s, and unfortunately, it was also painfully short-lived. In just one month my site’s recurring visitors dropped by 40% and even worse, my loyal users lost faith in the standard I’d set for user experience. It was a hard lesson to learn, but one which is proving incredibly valuable with so many ad formats available and new ad tech companies popping out of the woodwork with promises, predictions, and strong opinions founded in their own self interests.

It’s experiences like this that have turned me into the paradoxical Yield Manager.

The Typing, Scrolling Yield Manager Paradox

A yield manager who is overly cautious about user experience is a contrarian, but the same goes for an SEO consultant who guides a publisher to record highs in revenue.

We advise publishers to fight the urge to develop a shortsighted, myopic focus on metrics like CLS and CPM as it only leads to impulsive decisions which can be prevented by leveraging the collective century of experience our Yield and Product teams have among them.

There is as much art as there is science when we navigate these waters. No two websites are truly the same, just as no two publishers are. We cater to your needs with our collective experience and try to navigate all of the unprecedented waters this industry faces.

Optimizing for Efficiency and Deadline Changes 

Google Core Web Vitals

Spoiler alert: Google has announced they are moving Core Web Vitals to Mid-June. That sounds like an opportunity to me. Here’s what I’d suggest you focus on:

As Freestar’s paradoxical Yield Manager and SEO Expert, I ask each of you to take the time to connect with your audience and rediscover the behavior of your audience. Ask questions, listen, and have enough empathy to simulate their experience on your site. You’ll be amazed at what you uncover from using a tool like CrazyEgg and/or HotJar to measure and anonymously record user sessions, scroll depth, and click/tap density.

Another area publishers are finding success is by redefining the way they interpret their Google Analytics data. When you know things like ad refresh, ad density per page, and your eCPM, you can easily find the recipe for consistent and scalable success within your editorial teams. There are likely more valuable topics to write about without changing the makeup of your editorial approach and philosophy. 

According to Contentsquare’s 2020 Digital Experience Benchmark report of 7 billion user sessions, the Average Time on Page across industries is 62 seconds. That’s two impressions per in-view ad placement if you’re refreshing every 30 seconds.

Optimize for average time on page by creating thorough, engaging, and in-depth content which is comprehensive without being redundant. It’s this sort of thinking which yields just as high of returns as the number of ads on the page, or a specific ad unit. It also gets you to repeat users and helps build your readership.

We opt for a methodical approach which improves with testing and iterating. We know from historical data and experience that the rules can change at any time, and for that reason we build flexibility into our products which allows us to adapt rapidly to any change in the search landscape.

Stay Funky.
Sincerely,
Brian Weiss 
Ft. Funk Works Team

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The Latest on Core Web Vitals https://freestar.com/the-latest-on-core-web-vitals/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-latest-on-core-web-vitals https://freestar.com/the-latest-on-core-web-vitals/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2021 21:57:04 +0000 https://freestar.com/?p=3575 As anticipated, interest in Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) search algorithm update which begins in May has grown continually. To address this and other rapid developments in the digital landscape, Freestar has assembled an agile taskforce, dubbed “Funk Works” in honor of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works department. This group has been working on CWV and CLS projects for the last few months. If this paragraph has you really confused, please go back and read our primer around Freestar’s approach to Core Web Vitals.

As a sneak peak, here’s the before and after of one of the websites we’ve conducted our preliminary tests on:

BEFORE FREESTAR OPTIMIZATIONS:

AFTER IMPLEMENTING FREESTAR’S SOLUTION:

How our publishers can get ahead:

As Freestar nears completion of our first official line of ad products optimized for search, we ask that our publishers focus on the foundation upon which their sites are built. To facilitate this, our Account Managers have tools readily available upon request which will allow you to identify areas for improvement for the core vitals and other metrics weighed in determining rankings.

As we continue to develop new products and solutions to meet our publishers’ needs, we urge our publishers to return their attention to optimizing their foundations.
By conducting these tests and proactively striving for optimal search performance, publishers will have a major advantage when our solution suite is released.

What are major publishers doing about CLS?

It’s no coincidence that many publishers, especially those known as innovators in SEO strategy, have been improving upon their user experience the last few months. 

Their focus has turned to improving page speed by optimizing factors not controlled by Freestar and the results have been promising to say the least. Here are a few examples of publishers showing initial improvements:

Something you can do – if you aren’t already – that is a big component of load time is to investigate working with a Content Delivery Network (CDN’s). You can learn more on the Web Vitals blog to ensure fast page loads across the globe.

Overview of CDN’s:

A content delivery network consists of a network of servers that are optimized for quickly delivering content to users. Although CDNs are arguably best known for serving cached content, CDNs can also improve the delivery of uncacheable content. Generally speaking, the more of your site delivered by your CDN, the better.

At a high-level, the performance benefits of CDNs stem from a handful of principles: CDN servers are located closer to users than origin servers and therefore have a shorter round-trip time (RTT) latency; networking optimizations allow CDNs to deliver content more quickly than if the content was loaded “directly” from the origin server; lastly, CDN caches eliminate the need for a request to travel to the origin server.

The Road Ahead:

Freestar is finalizing our work with our demand partners, our ad products, and our code in general. We expect to finish all initial testing of a CLS-optimized ad stack by the end of April. As mentioned in our article from April 1st, this product will be an opt-in feature for our publishers; we do not yet know the full scope of the revenue impact this will cause. 

Once testing is completed, we will be rolling out to opted-in publishers in waves in May, and reporting back findings throughout our Newsletter and these Blog posts. As with any of these major Google updates, we intend to be flexible and iterate as time goes on.

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Freestar’s Approach to Core Web Vitals https://freestar.com/freestars-approach-to-core-web-vitals/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=freestars-approach-to-core-web-vitals https://freestar.com/freestars-approach-to-core-web-vitals/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2021 22:13:38 +0000 https://freestar.com/?p=3501 By: Andy Forwark, Product Manager

Freestar is building an update to our core code that will provide several optimizations around the Core Web Vitals (CWV) update that Google will be enforcing in May of this year as part of their prioritization to provide a quality page experience.

Given that Core Web Vitals consists of three new core vital signs – which measure perceived page experience – it’s expected that beginning in May 2021, we will start to see the impact across the search landscape play out over time, rather than an abrupt change. For further reading, you can read some of our tactical suggestions on the impact of Core Web Vitals on Monetization by our very own Brian Weiss on AdExchanger.

Let’s quickly touch on a previous large change from Google for context. On April 21st, 2015, Google gave advanced notice and provided tools for a search algorithm update which prioritized a Mobile-First user experience, which has since been dubbed the “mobilegeddon”. 

Later that year, on October 26th, the RankBrain algorithm update applied machine learning to prioritize search results based on the quality of a page’s user-interface, content, and relevance to the original query.

The reason we’re highlighting these two previous core updates is to illustrate that the last time Google was so open about changes to their algorithms, it was part of a multi-faceted series of updates which were staggered out over a year.

Freestar’s approach to the upcoming changes is an opt-in approach which will allow publishers more control over the code we deliver to your site. If you decide to opt-in, we will then deliver a Page Speed optimized version of our ad stack. With this new option, we will remove any products, networks, or other components that we deem to have a negative effect on the three main criteria around this CWV update. By selecting this option, this will help ensure that the advertising components we deliver will have a neutral to low impact on your CWV score, but naturally there is a chance it will also lead to negative revenue implications. For existing Freestar clients, please work with your dedicated Account Manager for a walkthrough of the simple changes you’ll need to make on your end to test this new feature on your site.

In the words of Google, focus on content:

“Pages that drop [in ranking] after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. This said, we understand those who do less well after a core update change may still feel they need to do something. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

While you focus on content, let us focus on the heavy lifting. Freestar is aiming to have this new feature available in early May, to correspond with when we believe Google will begin their rollout process of CWV scores. We anticipate the way these core vitals will be measured/scored will go through changes or iterations, and our solution is built to be flexible and help keep our publishers ahead of the curve.

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