Commentary

How IAB Standard Gave Native Mobile Wings

Last year, the IAB updated its open real-time bidding standard in an effort to, well, standardize how native ads can be traded on exchanges, and other programmatic marketplaces.

I know -- standardizing native ads sounds like a contradiction in terms. At least in the U.K., however, new research shows that the so-called OpenRTB 2.3 programmatic standard had a near-instantaneous impact on the market -- and the mobile market in particular.

In 2014, 50% of native spend spanned all devices -- 40% was for desktop-only and 10% was mobile-only. By 2015, however, mobile-only tripled in size to 30%, according to new findings from native ad firm Adyoulike. (In case you’re wondering, desktop-only fell to 15%, while half the spend remained device-agnostic.)

What’s more, last year saw 81% of publishers running native ads on mobile, compared to only 62% in 2014, Adyoulike found.

The firm also found that the average dwell time for native ads on mobile was 2.4 minutes in 2015 -- compared to 2.2 minutes in 2014 -- while growth in dwell time on desktops was flat at around the 1.1-minute mark.

“It’s also clear that mobile and native are a match made in heaven,” Francis Turner, UK managing director of Adyoulike, notes in the new reports. “Native ads provide quality content, which consumers demand, delivered in-feed in a way that doesn’t spoil the mobile experience.”

The research also highlighted the influence of mobile on which headlines were most successful with audiences. More than half (53%) of ads with shorter headlines measuring 1-40 characters were clicked through in 2015, compared to 32% in 2014.

Meanwhile, the number of ads with longer headlines (70-90 characters) that were clicked on fell from 36% to 17%.

On top of which, headlines that didn’t have any brand names mentioned were four times more likely to be pursued than those that did -- up from twice as likely in 2014.

 “It may well be the influence of mobile that made ads with shorter headlines even more accessible and successful last year,” according to Turner. “There’s also a possibility that consumers are getting switched off by listicles or click-bait titles with overlong titles.

For its findings, Adyoulike said it analyzed 1.3 billion in-feed native ads run in the UK throughout 2015.

1 comment about "How IAB Standard Gave Native Mobile Wings".
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  1. Arnon Dembo from my6sense, April 28, 2016 at 9:33 a.m.

    Does this statistics include also recommendation widgets?


     


    To the best of my knowledge most programmatic native providers such as Adsyoulike don’t support the recommendation widget native ad unit at the end of article pages (only the In-Feed ad unit), and ignore that much higher volume segment in their reports. The vast majority of native ad traffic is served over recommendation widgets, mostly non programmatically by content networks such as Outbrain, Taboola, RevContent. Only a few pioneers offer programmatic native solutions over recommendation widgets despite their much higher volume, due to technology challenges. One such pioneering publishers is Hearst, serving full programmatic publisher-owned solution on its US magazines – Elle, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping and more.    

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