Nice cliche headline, no? I thought so.
The day before MLB kicks off the 2010 season (Lets go Red Sox!), I was exploring the featured contet on MLB.TV. In nut shell, they need to fix the ad load in a major way.
If you allow the site to automatically deliver a playlist, the ad load seems ok.
However, if you manually bounce around the videos – video snacking – the MLB site delivers a pre-roll in front of every clip. Premium content on not, MLB.TV is violating a cardnial rule. I received a :30 pre-roll in front of clips that were :29 seconds, :20 seconds, :28 seconds and :31 seconds long. Not good.
There does seem to be some sort of frequency cap detection going on. After the first 4-5 clips, no ads are served for a while. But where are all the advertisers? I saw 3 Edward Jones ads and at least 3 from Speed Stick. This is some of the most premium video content available. Don’t advertisers want in? Surely MLB.TV watchers are more than armpit stained men with money to invest. Er…..maybe not?
So, MLB.TV, please tweak your ad serving rules. Few users will make it past the first few clips if you continue to heavy up the ad load at the beginning of a session. We’d love to know what your ad serving rules are if you’d care to share them. Maybe they make more sense for a longer session. We just want to know.
You can catch the Red Sox take on the Washington Nationals – the last pre-season game – for free on MLB.TV today at 4pm. Or any other game. MLB.TV is offering up a free preview this weekend. Check it out. I’ve already got my premium subscription, and its worth every penny.
Corey, I don’t think the ads ran out after 4 or 5 clips because of a user-based frequency cap — more likely it was a marketer-based frequency cap. Meaning, the marketers probably set rules that they could only show their ads to each user 3 times per day, and you hit that limit for the two marketers who have bought on the site for now. Trust me, if MLB.tv had more marketers in the system, they’d have shown you ads until the cows came home.
I just referenced this post when posting my own thoughts on the topic.
[...] this month, Corey Kronengold at Online Video Watch was complaining about the in-stream ad load at MLB.tv. But unfortunately for Corey – and for the other two-thirds of US Internet users who now [...]
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