Click Fraud to Play Fraud

Interesting discussions lately in ReelSEO and IndustryPace on an issue we can call ‘Play Fraud’. Think of click fraud, but with video plays instead of clicks.

It shouldn’t surprise any of us that this issue has come up. Many video platforms are paid by the play, regardless of whether the viewer watches for any period of time and despite declining CDN costs to deliver content. Ad networks delivering video are paid by the play, so they have a vested interested in defining ‘play’ as liberally as possible to increase plays and revenue. It’s increasingly common to see video ads that auto-play below the fold on a page, communicating nothing to the audience and creating no value for the advertiser…while counting as a video view.

My unscientific, hard-to-quantify definition of a video view is:

A user engages with the content. Someone clicks ‘Play’ on purpose, not accidentally. They normally do so in order to see a given piece of content. Do pre-roll ads count? Maybe. But they have to be relevant and targeted to meet the ‘engages’ criterion. Students sit through lectures. They’re engaged by great instructors. Pre-roll can be either. Do I simply tolerate the Marriot pre-roll ad as if it were a lecture, do I cut class by clicking away, or do I take away the desired message?

A user stays engaged with the content for a period of time long enough to have a reasonable probability of affecting their post-viewing behavior. With eCommerce video, that means watching a video on a product or category page long enough to have the video assist in the buying decision. Other advertising may work higher up in the funnel and hence may have different goals, but the user still has to watch for long enough to affect those goals. Do I watch the Marriot ad long enough to consider staying there on my next business trip?

Yeah…I know you can’t quantify that as easily as initiation of a play. But that’s what a view is from a publisher’s perspective. And the further a billing definition of ‘view’ is from a publisher’s definition, the more friction there will be in the ad-supported and view-driven areas of the industry. Which is why non-view-based monetization models may have a very bright future.