Publishers Keep Ads ‘Viewability’ to Themselves

Ad buyers want to know their ads are indeed seen by target audiences. Publishers want and need advertising money and one could only think that in order to receive it, they would offer relevant statistics. Well, it looks like things aren’t as simple as that, as a new report that analyzed actual buys made across 425,000 sites and included display, video, mobile and social network ads shows.

The “Q3 Market Pulse” report made by Accordant shows that in this quarter only 29% of the biddable inventory disclosed whether the ads were viewable. This percent is revealing a constant decrease, from 32% in the second quarter, and from approximately 40% in prior quarters. These numbers are rather intriguing as in this period advertising agencies and trade groups look for “viewability” – meaning advertisers would only pay for ads that are seen.

“Publishers can opt to set that setting and disclose that position, but some publishers have actually tightened back the reins,” said Craig Schinn, vice president-analytics at Accordant.

“Kamal Hotchandani of Haute Living said “The biggest and smartest media machine in the world is Google and the more information publishers have, the better options to maintain a win-win long-term collaboration with consumers, advertisers and publishers.”

“We think they’re hurting themselves by blocking the data, because they’re blocking themselves from being on the plan,” stated Accordant CEO Art Muldoon. “We have clients who only want viewable ads, and if we don’t have that data, we can’t put them on the plan for those clients.”

Google Adwords are famous and their model preffed and handsomely paid for due to the fact that advertisers know they are paying only for those ads that get clicked. With such a competition, publishers should try to provide information on what type of ads are really working on their websites in order to create and maintain a win-win long-term collaboration with advertisers.