You’ve probably heard the statistics. YouTube gets more visitors every night than ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox network television – combined!
But if that’s the case, why hasn’t online video become a huge new venue for advertisers? The answer is simple. Fraud.
In fact, The Wall Street Journal last week published an excellent article on this topic:
Bots and ‘Drone Pools’: The Deep Bag of Tricks in Video-Ad Fraud
Yup, the online video world is filled with bogus Web sites. Fake traffic. Online robots. Drones. Computers infected with viruses. In fact, the article estimates that 36% of Internet traffic doesn’t come from human beings at all. And that means too few real people watching real video ads.
The reality of today’s market for online video advertising: it’s full of scammers and hustlers…all working hard to grab your online advertising dollars. So tread carefully. If you’re a home improvement advertiser looking for more leads, it’s a den of thieves.
Now, I go to a lot of online marketing conventions and Internet Geek expositions. While there I invariably see the latest and greatest “networks” of media Web sites and “media exchanges”. Sales reps pitch them as the newest best way to buy ads online. They want to sell you display ads on the “thousands of Web sites” in their networks.
On the face of it, these networks give advertisers like you exactly what you want: broad distribution across the Web, targeted to you customer base.
Unfortunately, because these networks are comprised of thousands of Web sites, it’s impossible for these networks to retain anything close to quality control.
And in most cases, these networks don’t care about the quality of the video traffic they sell. In short, video networks don’t monitor their traffic for fraud—simply because it means less revenue for them. You really can’t expect the rats to protect the cheese.
Fortunately, there are some reasonable ways for home improvement companies to experiment with online video advertising. And I’ll address those next time around.