Demand for online video ads grows

Publication date: 30 January 2019

Online video ads

In 2018, advertisers spent about 5% of their Internet budget on video advertising, Mediascope research company with a reference to data from IMHO reported. Expenditures in this segment grew by 20% to 10 billion rubles without VAT. In 2017, advertisers spent 8.3 billion rubles on video ads.

Experts from Mediascope said that online video ads (in-stream video ads on all sites on desktop, Russia 100+, 12–64 years of age) were placed by about 4,400 advertisers last year, 2,800 of which were newcomers. 6% of all advertising tools were used by new advertisers. In 2017, online video ads were placed by only 3,700 advertisers.

The number of ad views grew by 30% in 2018. The strongest growth was in retail (by 98%), finances (86%), and games (65%) categories. Pharmacy was the only segment where the number of ad views fell (by 16%) last year. The main growth was due to those advertisers who were running campaigns in both 2017 and 2018. There were a total of 1,600 of such advertisers, and more than half of them increased the number of their ads.

FMCG remains the largest segment in terms of views (23%) followed by retail and finances (10% each). Telecom and games have 8% and 7% of views, respectively.

It should be noted that 29% of the audience watch videos only on mobile devices; 27% do it on desktop devices; about 44% use both. On average, users spend 13 days a month on watching videos and consume 26 videos a day.