Insider is ramping up its cross-platform video ads

The cross-platform sell allays the brand-safety concerns of sensitive advertisers while giving buyers more targeted scale across the publisher’s video inventory.

“One of our hit shows is ‘The Great Cheese Hunt,’ and globally there are enough people excited by cheese to make it a hit, but I have a hard time believing a TV network would greenlight a show devoted to cheese,” said Pete Spande, publisher and CRO at Insider Inc. “Being able to pool this inventory and focus gives us scale we cannot replicate on site or any one platform, this gives us significantly more revenue for our video advertising.”

Spande would not share specific figures but said in the past six months the Insider TV business has more than doubled. He added that revenue this year is also seeing strong momentum. Spande said that the blended CPMs are comparable to Google Preferred rates, which opens up the top 5% of top-performing YouTube channels. Viewers are happy to watch the ads as well. According to the publisher, view-through rates for ads on Insider TV are frequently above 90%.

Insider TV has hundreds of millions of streams that are eligible to mid-roll and pre-roll ads, said Spande. Partly, the reason for launching Insider TV last summer was partly due to the growth of its YouTube audience, which has ballooned as the publisher has focused on longer videos. YouTube inventory fluctuates between a third and a half of Insider TV inventory, said Spande.

Typically, the publisher’s video team of approximately 100 staffers focuses on creating videos between six and 15 minutes long that can fit across platforms. The strategy seems to have paid off: it had 245 million views across its 12 YouTube channels in March, 10 times the number it had in 2017, according to Tubular Labs. From the start of 2019, YouTube subscribers have grown 4.8% month-on-month, higher than any other platform.

Insider Inc. has been able to sell YouTube inventory direct to buyers since 2017. The benefits of selling direct means publishers can fetch a higher margin, but the platform still takes the same cut, in YouTube’s case 45 percent. Agency sources in the U.K. said Google Preferred CPMs range between £18 ($23.56) and £30 ($39.27). Agency sources say CPMs for selling YouTube direct can be up to three times the usual price. But direct sells are also a unique selling point to get brands feeling more comfortable about spending with YouTube again after brand-safety problems. In the U.K., media owners who are eligible to sell YouTube direct saw an increase in demand in February.

“The latest [YouTube brand-safety] issues created more resonance for what was already a popular discussion,” said Spande. “We didn’t see phones ringing off the hook, but any serious discussion about Insider TV includes a serious discussion about brand safety. That is a primary feature of the product, so advertisers generally focus on it.”

The publisher is still ramping up Insider TV. It has more than doubled the number of campaigns that ran between the third and fourth quarter last year, according to Spande, though he wouldn’t share the advertisers it was working with or how many. While the publisher has run a number of programs in the U.K., Insider TV is more commonly bought in the U.S. for now. It plans to expand in more global markets after the first year.

“It’s a solid offering and one that clients would be interested in,” said Jessica Reid, programmatic planning director at Havas Media Group. “The slow uptake in the [U.K.] market is partly because we’re siloed in how we buy video. On the plan and in reality are very different when it should be more holistic.” Reid said only one other U.K. publisher has approached her with a related way of trading, although this was a minimum spend on buying pre-roll across publisher Twitter channels.

In the U.S., Group Nine and BuzzFeed have recently ramped up their own cross-platform video sales products and seen revenue in the millions of dollars.

“One of the challenges is how do you get consistency across different channels in measurement, targeting and reporting,” said Reid, adding that Facebook and YouTube have different ways of measuring a view. Last October, the company decided to prioritize 30-second views over three-second views and passed the 1 billion 30-second view count last summer.

“We decided it was better for advertisers and us to package across different platforms and have a discussion about how we reach the audience through the content than spend a lot of time diagnosing which platform to fit that advertiser’s needs,” said Spande.

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