• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 5, 2018

View-through rates (VTRs) for native video ads remain high in the first three months of 2018. In-feed native video VTRs average around 40% worldwide and 60% viewability. The U.S., UK and Ireland have among the highest rates at 42%, according to a report scheduled for release Wednesday.

Adyoulike’s State of Native Video Report 2018 contradicts the notion that mobile users have limited attention spans and are only interested in short video content. The 2018 data, which sets out to disprove that theory, identifies key trends gathered from more than 30 million in-feed video views run across the Adyoulike platform from January to April 2018. Mobile users do -- and will continue to -- engage with longer video content when the content interests them.

"It's been said that anything beyond six seconds we have a goldfish-type memory when we're online on mobile, but this data shows otherwise," said Dale Lovell, chief digital officer at Adyoulike.

The report shows that smartphone users are more likely to spend time engaging with long-form video ads compared to six-second ads when executed correctly. Some 72% of mobile users who have watched six-second content will continue to watch and engage with video for up to 22 seconds. When native video reaches between 15 and 22 seconds in length across premium environments, publishers for mobile and tablet users that have watched this far are significantly more engaged than desktop users.

Ironically, on mobile devices, engagement rates rise to 71% between 15 seconds and 22 seconds, then fall again to 37% for videos between 22 seconds and 30 seconds. 

After six seconds, mobile and tablet users become more engaged than desktop users, but across premium publisher environments, mobile users engage with longer video content when the content interests them.

"Mobile videos are quite often 20- to 30-second TV ads just wrapped up and thrown out, but they don't have the punchline and quick engagement like those formatted correctly," he said.

About 33 million native video ads were watched across Adyoulike's network during the first four months in 2018. The number equates to 1,700 days, 42,000 hours, and 2.5 million minutes.