Online video ad viewing grows as short-form boosts consumption

Viewing on online video adverts grew 28% year-on-year in the third quarter of this year, while video views grew 37%, mostly driven by a relatively higher consumption of short-form content, according to video ad specialist FreeWheel’s Q3 Video Monetization Report.

The growth of short-form content was only eclipsed by the major increase in live viewing, which increased 60% year-on-year, again driven largely by Olympics and news coverage.

Short-form and live content achieved high double-digit growth, with the Olympics and US election driving much of that traffic.

Sports and News categories grew by 76% and 45% respectively.

Live news ad views, fueled by US election coverage, grew by 145%.

FreeWheel said that TV viewing of online content was driving growth, fueled  by bigger content libraries, familiarity with TV Everywhere services and greater connected device adoption.

Set-top ad viewing grew by 103% to take a 16% share in the US, compared with 6% in Europe.

Long-form content, which has shown double-digit growth since FreeWheel started producing this report in 2010, continued to increase – 18% year-on-year – as more consumers chose to watch shows in non-linear environments.

Despite short-form growth, long-form continues to be the dominant driver of ad views with a 41% share even in the US, where short-form content accounts for a greater proportion of ad views than in Europe. In Europe, long-form accounted for 88% of ad views in the quarter.

Programmatic buying and selling remains relatively small in relation to video. While programmers are transacting with more automation, which saw 92% year-on-year growth, automatic trading remains small part of the overall monetisation strategy, representing 7.3% of ad views, according to the report.