Advertising technology provider OpenX on Thursday launched a mobile video advertising exchange. The twist? The exchange is dedicated to opt-in video ads, ads that consumers choose to watch in exchange for consuming content.
The product had been in private alpha with about 100 mobile applications, and OpenX is now moving it to beta and opening it up widely.
The company expects between 500-750 publishers sign on this year, and hopes to expand to a few thousand over time.
“The key with opt-in video is really the consumer,” Maggie Mesa, vP of mobile business development at OpenX tells Digital News Daily. “We were really using the alpha period to figure out how consumers and publishers were using the format within the app, because it is a much different experience than traditional pre-roll or mid-roll.”
Mesa said that during the alpha, the completion rate on video ads was greater than 90%, a 30% improvement over all other video ad formats.
Indeed, Mary Meeker, the venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, noted the relative success of opt-in video advertising in her latest Internet Trends report. Meeker’s report found that incentive-based ads were viewed positively by consumers, while ads like pop-ups and pre-rolls were viewed negatively.
“Users are opting in, they are completing the video at an extremely high rate, and they are engaging with the ad,” Mesa says.