Dive Brief:
- Yahoo’s NewFront event this year was all about video including its importance on Yahoo’s four key verticals – news, sports, finance and lifestyle – and in native and programmatic video advertising through its BrightRoll and Yahoo Gemini ad tech platforms.
- At the event, the company announced video advertising was up 64% in 2015. In terms of video in general, Yahoo users are watching 55% more video and spending 85% more time with video content.
- Lisa Utzschneider, chief revenue officer at Yahoo, said in a blog post, “It’s the combination of Yahoo’s world-class content, technology and unique data that is critical for advertisers in 2016 and makes Yahoo an important partner.”
Dive Insight:
Yahoo’s focus on video comes days after the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported original digital video advertising increased 114% since 2014. The IAB report also showed that 68% of respondents said they believed original digital video would become as important as original TV programming within the next three to five years.
Yahoo is also adding third-party viewability measurement by Moat to its Yahoo Gemini native video format with guaranteed viewability thresholds for those ads. It had previously announced viewability measurement for display and other video formats last year.
Utzschneider told Adweek the company is "doubling down" on ad tech and that programmatic advertising now makes up over 50% of the Yahoo's overall revenue. "We're seeing that shift; we're investing in the shift," she said.
At the Digital Content NewFront event, Adweek reported that Yahoo is also planning on expanding live video, an area that Facebook had previously made a point of focus. In the year ahead, Yahoo will expand its live sports coverage, in which it found much success last fall streaming an NFL game.
"This is just the beginning. There is more to come as we we continue building our ad offerings and video content in our core verticals where we have a strong foothold and will continue to grow," Utzschneider wrote in the blog post.
