Wen Weixi

Source: Weixi Chat Ads (ID: weixiads)

There are some Internet products: you think it's simple, even stupid, but in fact it's designed to be so subtle and thoughtful that YouTube's five-second skipped patch ads are unique.

Many scientific online partners will find that Youtube ads in 5 seconds after a skip button, click on the ads immediately disappear, accustomed to the domestic video site ultra-long ads "rape" users exclaimed: That's great!

In this regard, many people intuitively judge: Google is the conscience of the planet enterprises, in order to user experience can sacrifice business interests, compared to the excellent soil, Ai Qiyi this kind of dynamic 120 seconds of advertising beautiful bitch much stronger!

But is that really the case? If you really think so, then you are wrong, the truth is far from so simple, said Google pay attention to the user experience, casually pick out some counter-examples will be minute by minute face, in Youtube search "I am a singer", a two-hour video can have 21 ads, which obviously and pay attention to the user experience is not god horse.

The yellow dot in the middle is where the ad is inserted

Since the user experience isn't the first consideration for Youtube to set the skip button, is the god horse factor driving Google to do so? The answer is money!

Wait a minute....... Do you still have money to make? Do advertisers like its ads to be skipped? I read less, don't lie to me! Yes, advertisers really like this kind of advertising product, which seems counterintuitive, but you can see the analysis below.

Because you subconsciously want to skip the ad, so you will not walk away within 5 seconds, you do not walk away, you will also focus on the ad, that is, within 5 seconds, the ad arrival rate is very high.

For a long time, brand ads are settled by exposure, but after exposure, many people really watch has been a monitoring difficulty in the advertising circle,YouTube effectively enhances the true exposure of ads by simply skipping the button to get users' full attention in 5 seconds.

This is very different from the domestic video site ads, in Youku to see a 120-second patch ads, from the moment the ad jumps out of your eyes will immediately loose, greatly may go to do other things: drink water, brush a circle of friends, brush Weibo, walk the grass pomegranate. . . and so on ...

So If Youku's front patch is selling 4 stickers in 120 seconds,The first and last stickers will cost more than the second and third stickers.Advertisers are not stupid, they won't pay a high price for drinking water toilets among you.

Another obvious advantage of skipped ads is that advertisers add a dimension to measure the quality of their ads.It knows exactly whether its ad was skipped by the user in the first few seconds, and whether it was skipped in the 7th or 23rd reflects the attractiveness of the ad.

This is the true quality index of advertising, there is no more detailed display of the excellence of a patch ad than this data,The click-through rate of the patch is the result indicator of the performance of the ad, while the length of skip is the process index of the performance of the ad.

Domestic Youku Love Qiyi's non-skipping patch completely can not do this, it only knows the exposure to which people, also know who clicked, but the overall patch click-through rate generally does not exceed 2% of the case, the remaining up to 98% of users on the real behavior and attitude of Youku know nothing about advertising, is a black box.

YouTube's skip button becomes a key to pry open the black box.It adds an extremely real interaction, and this magic button can be neither negative (skip immediately) nor positive (stick to reading), providing effective space for advertisers to optimize their ads.

Don't look down on this indicator, when you have one, you can redirect people who are watching close to completion (the next time you put it to someone who's already had some interaction) and Look alike (recommend another group of people who are similar to the other based on the characteristics of a known part of the population).

Click is the target customer, read is the potential customer, so YouTube by adding this little skip button,made him a free advertising quality judge for thousands of users,You skip it, it peeps at you, you think about it.

If your ad is skipped, YouTube won't charge you, you'll only be charged if your ad plays for 30 seconds or is finished (the ad length is less than 30 seconds).This.YouTube named the ad "Tureview Ad," or "Tureview Ad."You only have to pay for real viewing.

Advertisers are highly available for this form of spot advertising, paying only for people who are really interested in the ad, and for collecting information about people who are not interested in the adFrom this point on, the advertiser experience is really friendly, and their spending on YouTube in 2016 was $12.6 billion, which is enough to illustrate the strong appeal of YouTube advertising.

Not having to pay for invalid skips undoubtedly gives advertisers a friendlier experience in ROI calculations and budget control, which explains why many YouTubers often call on people not to skip front-page ads in videos because advertisers don't pay because advertisers don't pay, and advertisers certainly don't have ads to split up.

Hearing this, a lot of people are starting to say that YouTube is too generous to charge for watching a Facebook video ad for more than 3 seconds!

In fact, it's not about kindness, it's about different ways of bidding, and it doesn't mean you're necessarily less expensive to run video ads on YouTube than Facebook.

Bidding by exposure, playing bidding in 3 seconds, bidding by Play Complete are just three different bidding methods, of course, these three bidding methods from the advertiser-friendly degree must be a recurring relationship.

"In theory, the overall unit cost is in fact the same in the case of full competition (the detailed logic of the bid cost is not repeated here)." Take a chestnut: fresh walnuts 10 pieces a jin, peel off the skin of 20 pieces of walnuts a jin, walnuts 40 pieces a jin (full competition in the case of these three prices must be incremental).

You may find it most easy to sell walnuts from the shopping experience, but you certainly don't think it's the kindest way to sell walnuts from the price, you'll certainly count, if four kilos of fresh walnuts peel out more than a kilo of walnuts, then you're sure to buy fresh walnuts;

One of the key is whether you will pick walnuts, you pick good, you will earn, this inside pick walnutsThis skill corresponds to an important concept in bidding ads called "creative optimization", or "CTR optimization".The following topics continue to talk about how YouTube has allowed advertisers to create friendly ads under this mechanism.

You must have seen in Youku or Ai Qiyi "butcher dragon treasure knife point to send", "I am Zhang Liangying, I am in XX page tour and so on you" such a very poor creative quality page tour ads, this is the cause of the god horse?One important reason is that Youku, Ai Qiyi's patches are priced for sale, pricing advertising is a disadvantage is that advertisers do not optimize the motivation of advertising creativity.

Advertisers spend 1 million a day to buy an open-screen advertising, no matter how bad the material will be online, he has no incentive to improve his material, because even if the material click-through rate is high he pays 1 million money and not because the click-through rate of high cost into 500,000 (strictly speaking, advertisers from the overall return point of view is motivated to optimize pricing advertising, but pricing advertising will not from the cost mechanism to encourage advertisers to optimize the material), so "Dragon Treasure Point" came!

But YouTube's pay-per-view ads can encourage advertisers to actively optimize their ideas from the mechanism, the better the creative materials, the higher the playback completion rate, the lower the cost of advertising,How does YouTube implement this mechanism?

Take a simplified model: Let's say YouTube has only 100 times a day, Nike and Adi are bidding, Nike has a 10% completion rate, and Adi is 1%, both of which bid $1 for a play to finish, so which one will Google come up with?

Nike, of course, because this 100 ad opportunities give Nike he can make 10 yuan, and to Adi can only make 1 dollar, Adi in order to win the bid must complete a bid of 10 yuan for a play, that is, the completion rate determines the cost of the ad auction.

It is such a mechanism, let advertisers play to optimize their advertising performance, and strive to let everyone do not skip ads, in order to increase their own playback completion rate, thereby reducing the cost of bidding.

With all the novel ideas on YouTube to boost playback completion rates, Opel is a case in point, playing games with ads and skipping buttons, an idea that won a prize at the Cannes Advertising Festival:

The advantage is that a lot of Google's ads are very bearable, very story-telling, which in turn increases the viewability of the ads, so that the user experience improves, and now you understand that the user experience is not the skip button, butBy optimizing your ideas with advertisers, the improvement in the user experience is only a by-product of skipping buttons.

Well, that's why YouTube takes skipped ads, and here's a big question for many people:

Are they stupid? This isn't really! "We will not allow other countries to say anything about the path we have chosen". Youku, Ai Qiyi choose is the development path of video commercialization with Chinese characteristics, the specific reasons are mainly the following three points:

Simply put, YouTube is a UGC video site, while Youku and Ai Qiyi are film and television sites.YouTube's videos above are mostly user-contributed, while domestic video sites are high-priced purchases of premium copyrighted content. If you have to target, the domestic video site is actually Hulu, Netflix, HBO, these dedicated movies, episodes of video services.

Each user's status is different when watching different videos, and we divide the two states into "high wake" and "low wake" states.

Spring Festival Evening Ads and Super Bowl Halftime Show ads are expensive, not only because it sees more people (Facebook at the same time the number of people online is certainly more), more importantly, the audience in watching the Spring Festival Evening, watching the Super Bowl when the state is "high wake-up" state, he has a strong desire to watch the program and desire, so the effect of advertising will be good, in Youku to see the variety of deer, watch Sun Yu's series, watch Wu Jing's movie is this "high wake-up" state.

The result of the "high wake-up" state is that content has a premium right to advertisers.Sign a "芈 Monthly Biography", advertisers will be flocking to sell, so do not need to sell effect ads, advertisers know the effect, in addition to buying your time, advertisers more importantly need to put its brand and deer, Sun Wei, Wu Jing linked.

That's not the case with YouTube, where videos are mostly made by users, where you won't see new Fox hits or HBO's latest episodes.Despite the rapid rise of professional video MCN institutions over the years, the overall production is becoming more and more specialized, but and professional film and television companies still have a big gap, the average video quality in the objective will be relatively mediocre.

So with the exception of a few super-reds, users watching YouTube videos are a "low wake-up call" state, which keeps refreshing and boring time under YouTube's extremely efficient video recommendation mechanism.

At the same time because the video is extremely long in distribution (For example, the proportion of the top 500 movies and TV series in total viewing time is much higher than Youtube, so the individual video playback will be much smaller than Youku, Ai Qiyi, so that brand advertisers when the pursuit of the two most important factors: quantity and quality, YouTube is not dominant, if it is also like Youku Aiqi, the most likely result is very low sales rate, ecPM is also very low.

So YouTube's strategy is that since you can't sell premium brand ads, you sell effect ads and charge for the end results to serve people.

In a word, cover it up:Business models determine ad models, with Youku Aiqi sitting on high-quality video resources at the top of the pyramid, pricing up to sell high prices without skipping, while YouTube is a long-tailed video that attracts advertisers with skipped performance ads.

Google is undoubtedly a technology company, and before it bought Youtube in 2006, its bidding advertising system, AdWords, was already an efficient money-printing machine, already well-established in algorithmic optimization and click-through rate estimation models for bidding ads.

What's more, in the process Google has accumulated a large number of advertisers who approve of its bidding model, these advertisers are not only small and medium-sized enterprises, Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola and other brand advertisers in 2006 has also been an important customer of Google, so by December 2010 Google launched Tureview ads,It makes sense to choose the spot mode, and its advertiser size is large enough to support it to form a long enough bidding queue.

And now Youku, Tencent video accounted for the majority of advertisers are basically SKA customers, the number of few brand advertisers is difficult to support it to establish a bidding model,The premise of playing bidding is to have a lot of people to bid.

In contrast, the pioneers of domestic video sites, whether from Sohu to create Youku's Gu Yongxuan or from Bertelsmann to create the potato Wang Wei, have a strong media gene, and Tencent's video is originally part of Tencent's online media business group.

These media people soon found a shortcut to preempt the user's time - giving up UGC, blood-wringing copyrighted content, and the video content ecology gradually drifted away at the same time also established the earliest business model of Chinese video sites - in the advantage of resources to sell pre-sales patches,And this model continues to this day, buy a "list", users come, advertisers also come, how good!

Today, we go to Youku, Achiyi's advertising page has several pages of media quotations, which are the same as 100 quotations on the portal and quotations on television stations.In this sense, the domestic video site is an online television station.

Users spend 20 yuan to open a Tencent video membership, the most direct role is to skip advertising, if Tencent online 5 seconds can skip the button, then the difference between members and non-members is not so obvious, directly affect the attractiveness of the membership business.

You know, Youku, Ai qiyi's membership income accounts for nearly one-fifth of all its income, in the first half of 2016 alone, Ai Qiyi's membership of more than 40 million, this income if lost, directly affect its financial situation.

Youtube doesn't have this baggage, and Youtube, which starts with family video clips like Kittens and Puppies, has not had a member service for quite some time, because it really doesn't have much boutique content for members to watch at the beginning of the period.

YouTube Red, a membership business that charges $12.99 a month, didn't do well until it bought some large copyrighted content in 2015, accounting for only 5% of total revenue in 2016. Therefore, domestic video sites from the protection of the rights and interests of members from the point of view of the degree of differentiation is also reluctant to jump the button for 5 seconds.

It has to be said thatIn fact, YouTube and Youku AiChiyi are internally unified in following the basic logic of advertising: high-quality videos are sold at a high premium, and long-tailed traffic is auctioned at an effective price.

YouTube launched the Google Preferred program in Q2 in 2014, packaging the top 5% of popular channels and holding a grand annual investment to pre-sell them, which is in fact Youku, Aiqi Art mode, while Youku and Tencent Video now have their own long-tailed videos through access to DSP and performance advertising platforms to launch five-second skipped patch ads.

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