• Advertising Age, Tuesday, August 19, 2008 11:15 AM

The impending death of the preroll ad has been vastly overstated, Advertising Age says, citing a report from Jupiter research director Nate Elliott that says audience loss as a result of preroll video ads could be as low as 5% -- in Europe, at least. Jupiter found that Europeans are watching double the amount of online TV than they were a year ago, and that the sector is expected to account for 20% of Europe's online display ad spend, or nearly $1.4 billion by 2012, up from 6% or $224 million in 2007.

"When I was doing the research for this report, I asked sites how hard their traffic had been hit by the introduction of in-stream ads," Elliott says. "The answer was very little. Usually they reported flat growth for a month or two or a few percent down before normal growth continued."

Elliott claims that half the people who abandon online video clips do so because of the content, not because of the appearance of a preroll ad. Since many sites report that at least 10% of users abandon videos within 15 seconds of watching the clip -- even with no preroll -- only 5% of abandoned clips should be directly attributable to the advertising tactic, according to the report.

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