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What would be a reasonable price for a CPM ad?

Can a publisher charge on a "Cost per completed view" (CPV) basis for a video ad? It seems like a buyer can buy on a CPV basis but a publisher working through an intermediary like Google cannot.

  • I have a video website with long form content (30 minutes to 2 hours). Each video of 30 minutes in duration costs me about 10 cents to stream (bandwidth). These are essentially my marginal costs. The content is premium content, so I believe I can tell users that they must watch a certain number of ads to watch the content. I have read that Youtube and various companies charge anywhere from between 10 cents to 30 cents per *completed view* to end clients. I love this model, because the client is ensured of a completed view. Based on this, I would have terrific gross margins if I could convince my users to watch say two 30 second ads lasting 1 minute in all. The problem is while I understand on the "buy" side, you see the 10-30 cent price, that is not what you see on the sell-side. On the sell side they go by CPMs and at $10 per CPM, I am getting only 1 cent per completed ad. They do not differentiate between completed views and impressions. This, in turn decreases the incentive to have non-skippable ads. Google talks about keeping only a small commission of 20%, but that seems to be a bit misleading to me. As you can imagine, there is a lot of difference between 1 cent per view and 30 cents. Consumers will certainly not accept 10 ads lasting 5 minutes for a 30 minute video. Please tell me if there is something I am missing here! Thanks a lot!

  • Answer:

    Google does this with TruView, which means only if you watch a certain amount of the ad are you charged. http://www.google.co.uk/ads/innovations/trueview.html

Tom Goodwin at Quora Visit the source

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Something isn't quite right here. You can sell your media using a CPCV model and if it's supported by your sell side, then it should be supported on the buy side too. I suppose there are platforms that don't support CPCV-based buying. If that's the case, to get a $0.10 CPCV and you truly have a 100% completion rate, then you'd have to charge $100 CPM. Even if they're buying on a CPM basis but optimizing for completion, your media should get bidded on, provided there isn't another high completion rate media source out there that's cheaper than yours. At $100 CPM, you won't be the cheapest. You'll need people on the buy side to care about the premium nature of your content. In an open marketplace, many may not care. However, there is NO way you get 100% completion rate. People abandon content all the time, especially during ads. Also, if you're looking to make $0.10, you'll have to account for whatever the sell-side platform charges you to monetize for you. You should really talk to various video companies that offer sell-side capabilities. In the US, there's Brightroll (acq by Yahoo), http://adap.tv (acq by AOL), Altitude Digital, Videology, and Pubmatic just to name a few. Shop around. Run tests.

Antony Chen

I would first clarify your terminology, of which there is a lot of confusion out there, even among some very savvy Agency personnel. CPCV and CPV, are *not* the same things, and you have mixed the two up in your question. The next issue, is that you want CPCV for long-form content. In a sea awash with :15's and :30's, something at 30 minutes, is going to be a tough sell. And getting a *completed view* of that at only $0.10, is extremly unlikely. The pool of people that will watch that length online of something unknown to them prior, is going to be very, very small.

Ken Nicholas

Maybe you might consider this: https://www.virool.com/publisher Please let me know if you talk to them what their conditions are. What I am afraid is that they may not have short 10-30 secs ads, if they have very long videos than that is not too interesting.

Paolo Messina

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