Vibrant Media Reduces Native Ad Weight To 30.5KB, Looks To Cut Down On Ad Blocking
- by Philip Rosenstein , July 14, 2016
Native contextual advertising company, Vibrant Media, announced on Wednesday the release of new technology that cuts the weight of its native ad products by 75% to 30.5KB. This includes in-text, in-image, out-of-stream video and high impact native ad formats.
The development of this new technology adheres to new principles put forward in the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) new LEAN initiative. LEAN refers to advertisements that are “light, encrypted, ad choice supported and non-invasive.”
According to Vibrant, the smaller ad formats will cut down on ad-blocking software downloads. “If other players in the industry start to act on the IAB’s LEAN initiative, we would expect to see a reduction in the rate of people downloading ad blockers,” Craig Gooding, founder and executive chairman of Vibrant Media, told Real-Time Daily via email.
An IAB UK study noted that 54% of people who use ad blockers do so because ads slow down their browsing experience.
“When you’re hitting ad weights of around 30KB, the impact of digital advertising on the download of web pages is unnoticeable,” added Gooding. “Advertising needs to fit seamlessly into the consumer’s browsing experience - not just by being native, relevant and entertaining -- but also technically.”
Getting below 30.5KB “will be a huge challenge,” according to Gooding. “However, we’d never say never. Technology is amazing.” Importantly, according to Vibrant, the reduction in ad weight does not affect the quality of the creative.
What is this quoting? The size of their initial javascript? It's certainly not the entire "ad product" that they put on the page. Vibrant has some of the most intrusive and slowest formats available today and these claims are meaningless unless actually tested and verified by objective research.
The size quoted is based on our core JavaScript library, the piece we directly control. This orchestrates the interaction with the page and the delivery of our various products. It does not include the creatives because these come from our advertisers and agencies, and the sizes vary in weight and complexity according to the type of creative (eg. simple graphic, rich media, video, full-screen branding). Our newly released platform has reduced our code footprint by over 80% whilst our servers now respond considerably faster. We’re not done yet by any means, but we’ve already made considerable progress.
We believe in the IAB’s LEAN principles and are dedicating considerable engineering effort towards them, as are an increasing number in the ad-tech sector.