Akamai study reveals effectiveness of online video advertisements

BANGALORE, INDIA: Akamai Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of cloud services for delivering, optimizing and securing online content and business applications, today announced the publication of a new scientific study that leveraged data from hundreds of millions of online videos and advertisements measured using the Akamai Sola Analytics media measurement and analysis product.

The research paper, "Understanding the Effectiveness of Video Ads: A Measurement Study" coauthored by S. S. Krishnan and R.K. Sitaraman, will be presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Barcelona on Thursday, October 24, 2013.

The study analyzed in aggregate 367 million videos and 257 million ads from over 3,000 publishers that were viewed by 65 million unique users worldwide.

Dr. Ramesh K. Sitaraman, Akamai Fellow and computer science professor at UMass-Amherst, who led the study, said: "This study is unique in that it goes above and beyond tracking and comparing completion rates, and rather takes an in-depth look at when viewers complete watching video ads and when they abandon them. By using novel scientific techniques for extracting knowledge from huge amounts of anonymized viewer data, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of video ads that are key to the monetization economics of online videos."