Lamenting Mobile Web Latency; Call For Measurement Unification

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Immobile

The New York Times takes a look at mobile web latency across 50 mobile sites, and the resulting charticle provides a scathing commentary on ad load times. The story singles out Boston.com (a NYT property until 2013), which the story’s authors say requires 30 seconds to deliver ad content on its home page and costs users about 30 cents per page load in data usage. At the other end of the spectrum is The Guardian, which doesn’t have the fastest page load, but has the least ad tech and is the most resilient against ad blocking. More.

Go Measure Yourself

Publishers, tech companies and agencies have pushed the agnostic measurement firms to consolidate or rationalize their differences. (It’s hard to optimize when measurement results are divergent.) No surprise then that, following news of comScore’s acquisition of Rentrak, the tension with Nielsen has heightened, according to Steven Perlberg at The Wall Street Journal. Perlberg documents some barbed comments from Nielsen President Steve Hasker and the CEOs of both Rentrak and comScore, who all sat on the same Ad Week panel. Read it.

Breaking The Movie Trailer

Netflix is gung-ho on sequential creative in its programmatic media buys, as reported by Jennifer Faull of The Drum. “A typical movie trailer has a three-act arc: Introduce the story, bring in an element of danger and then the conclusion,” CMO Kelly Bennett told an Advertising Week audience. “Instead of trying to do that in two minutes and thirty seconds how do we split it up into five, 10 and 15 seconds [of video]? How do we combine that 10-second Instagram moment with a 20-second TrueView?” Read on.

Why Fraud Persists

In a LinkedIn post, former AppNexus CTO Mike Nolet explores the perverse incentives supporting online ad fraud. He takes the example of MichaelGolf.com, an English-language website with scraped content that Google AdEx lists as the top source of video ad supply. Google prevented advertisers from paying for this ne’er-do-well’s property’s impressions, but it’s likely some money got through anyway. “There is no downside in trying,” he writes. “Law enforcement doesn’t do anything here so nobody is going to jail. What happens is that fraudsters just keep trying and trying and eventually make money. The only question is how much.” Read it.

But Wait, There’s More!