I find myself in the camp of the annoyed web surfer this morning, and it is directly related to online video.

We’ve been critical of sites that abuse the pre-roll format, calling them out for poor ad management practices and poor user experiences, and today is no different.

TheStreet.com, a leading provider of financial, investment and business news, offers a wealth of great video content (nice early morning pun). However, they are abusing the ad-to-content ratio, which is particularly annoying when trying to get a few quick financial news stories to start my day.

TheStreet.com is running pre-roll and post-roll around every story, for a total of one-minute of advertising against three minutes of content. While this would almost be tolerable if you were watching one clip and could essentially ignore the post-roll, they are doing it on all clips, resulting in an “Ad->Content->Ad->Ad->Content->Ad” experience for the user. The majority of the ads are :30s as well. Simply horrific. And what’s with the “Skip Ad” button that appears for the last 3 seconds of an ad? Useless.

Frequency capping is an issue for TheStreet.com as well, but one that I blame less on the publishers directly and more on the the video ecosystem. There aren’t enough pre-roll advertisers to enable ad rotation and frequency capping, and selling sponsorships around certain content doesn’t help that situation either.

Lastly, dayparting. Does anyone really need the first ad of the day to be for Viagra? I’m sipping my first cup of coffee. 30 seconds of a baby boomer jug band singing about their hard-ons is a little hard to take (oh boy, the puns today!). Again, a lot of this issue has to do with the lack of advertisers in the pre-roll game. But as we’ve said before, there is a lot of opportunity for early adopters to jump in to a very uncluttered advertising landscape.

So, TheStreet.com, I’m trying to catch a few quick financial news stories. You’ve got great content. Reconsider your monetization and inventory management strategies. Help prove the value of your content and pre-roll advertising, rather than driving CPMs down with an over abundance of cheap(er) inventory.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 9:14 am and is filed under Real Ads, Streaming, advertising, editorial, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.