Slate magazine wants to sell more video ads – it just needs to use text to get there.
“What’s next is video, video, video – we need to get more video on the site,” says Slate associate publisher Anthony DeMaio. “We’re doing four million streams a month – it’s still a very small percentage of our (total) inventory.”
Last month, Slate began adding video ad technology from Teads, allowing it to insert scroll-linked video ads in between article paragraphs – meaning Slate can make up for the lack of its own video inventory by instead using the abundant text inventory it does have. The product is called inRead.
“This Teads opportunity represents an enormous tectonic opportunity,” DeMaio adds. “Overnight, it exponentially increases our inventory. We can monetize three million pages of inventory per day.
“Completion rates are between 30 and 40%, versus a click-to-play preroll that’s 75% to 80%. Completion rates are half of what we’re seeing on preroll – therefore, we want prices to reflect that accordingly.”
So far, Slate has been selling the new-style spots directly to watchmaker Breitling and travel firm One&Only.
DeMaio was one of the speakers at the Beet.TV video advertising summit on “outstream” advertising presented by Ebuzzing & Teads. Please find more videos from that event here.
