• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, November 6, 2013

With the industry focused on viewability, click-through rates, cost, transparency, and other metrics, Webspectator is adding a new metric to the real-time marketplace: time.

Webspectator, a real-time advertising exchange that measures a consumer's time spent viewing ads, today unveiled its new "guaranteed to see" metric at ad:tech New York. Using time as a metric, not just impressions, the new technology allows publishers to re-auction ads at any time, even while a consumer is still looking at a page.

The company claims their technology can measure, up to the millisecond, the effective time audiences spend looking at an ad.

Andre Parreira, Webspectator's CEO, stated that the model allows publishers to max out inventory by serving more than one ad while a viewer is looking at a page. He added, "At the same time, advertisers can pay for what they are actually getting based on the time users are spending with their ads."

As a result, the company claims publishers can increase their ad revenue by 400%. They also claim the average click-through rate for digital campaigns is 10 times higher when using the tech.

The tech requires a single line of code to be added to each ad. The "guaranteed to see" metric measures time spent looking at an ad using Nielsen's 20 seconds of ad exposure as a benchmark. They use data that comes from browser "DOMs" (Document Object Models). DOM data tells them what people are interacting with on a Web page.

As Webspectator has their own exchange, each ad — even the impressions that are being resold while a consumer is still on the page — is bought and sold in real-time.  

Webspectator has over 500 clients globally and 13.5 billion page views in their network, according to Quantcast. According to Webspectator, the "guaranteed to see" metric is currently under review by the Media Ratings Council.