Study: Pre-roll ads scare away users
Cory Bergman January 22nd, 2008
A study by Burst Media reveals that more than half of all internet users bail out of a clip before the pre-roll stops playing, and a significant percentage leave the site entirely. Interestingly, younger users are more tolerant: 35% of 18-24 year olds close out a clip when they see a pre-roll ad, compared to 49.6% of 25-34 year olds. Of course, pre-rolls aren’t going away anytime soon, but I’d certainly call them a transitional video ad unit.
5 Comments Add your own
1. echy | January 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 am
I bail out when I see an ad start. It is just plain annoying. My question is why does an ad have to be associated with everything? It ridiculous.
2. discreet_chaos | January 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I wondered about the method used to generate the statistic, so I clicked through to the people who commissioned the survey (my name).
My thinking was that if it was based on actual behavior, I wondered if it was taking in account, where I click to watch a video, get a preroll and once my story was over, it auto-feeds me a preroll before the video which the site thinks I should watch.
Instead, I found that the survey was done by questionaire (an actual survey), so all of the data is self-reported and once you scroll down to their second barchart, I’d say it’s pretty suspect, especially since I don’t know the methodology: Were they phone interviws, or people who clicked on a “Want to take a Survey” ad?
3. discreet_chaos | January 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 pm
My above comment is pretty poorly punctuated, but I really can’t believe that more people over the age of 25 close a video when they see an ad, then actually watch it. I mean, a lot of people on this site are serving pre-rolls: Do you honestly believe that most people aren’t actually watching your content?
4. Shakir Razak | January 23rd, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Hi,
If you click on a video-box because you want to watch a video, and net-video-ads are normally sub-20 seconds, why would you stop the video, and even worse, go away from a whole site.
The only sincere answer is that people have clicked to a page, and a video has auto-started, where the user had little intention to watch a video.
The more likely sceptical answer is that the research was “flawed”!
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
5. Daniel | January 24th, 2008 at 10:36 am
That’s why advertisers must keep those ads under 10 seconds…
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