What Are Render Rates in Streaming Ad Insertion?
Learn more about streaming ad insertion and monetization at Streaming Media West 2022.
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Chris Pfaff: Talk about render rates, because of course this is a big issue that you focus on. Yeah. And also with, with a second look, which I think you should talk a bit about as well.
Brian Kline: When we get all this measurement, and we who we're targeting, what we think about is, how do you not send them the same ad three times in a row? When you had an ad opportunity with all of that data that you took advantage of, how do you make sure you get paid for it? All those things. So, render rate. Publishers look at a lot of things. They look at CPMs, they look at fill rates, and they look at render rates. In a server-side ad insertion situation, if you made a decision to show 20 ads to a customer over the course of a video, and they only watched half the video, and they saw 10 ads, that's a 50% render rate.
It sounds like accounting, but it has costs. And those costs come into two buckets. One is, you may pay serving fees on all 20 of those ads, depending on what your relationship is. You may pay stitching fees on all 20 of those ads, depending on what your relationship is. So it drives higher costs because you're paying fees on ads that you're actually not showing to the customer. The other thing which is a little bit lower level is the render rates are getting passed back into the ad infrastructure. So the DSPs are looking at these publishers and assets and saying, "Oh, well that that's a 30% render rate. I'm not gonna bid on the ads in the second half of that video. Those probably aren't gonna show or maybe I'm gonna bid less on them because I'm just gonna discount the chance that it's gonna show."
So that's one of the fundamental issues that we're looking at with a product we call 2nd look. We're giving VOD publishers with server-side ad insertion the ability to defer those decisions until right before the ad pod. So now, if you have an asset with 20 videos and/or ads in it, and you're making decisions pod by pod, instead of making all 20 of those up front. And it has the added benefit of more time to allow for failures to not happen. Get the video started sooner, and get the video monetized better, because if you need to tell your programmatic source that that ad served three minutes ago, you can do that with a more deferred timeline. We spend a lot of time looking at this problem. We talk to a lot of publishers. We know it's an issue they're facing, whether it's a this-generation or next-generation issue. And we're seeing a lot of excitement around it.
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