How to Make More Money with Advertising on Your Roku Channel

By Taylor Kirchwehm on March 24, 2016

Ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) provides your audience free access to your content, but it might not always be the most profitable monetization choice for your video business… until now.

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Nielsen and Roku entered into a strategic agreement to help put money in your pocket through Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR).

“We believe all TV will be streamed, and with it all TV advertising. We’re excited to join forces with Nielsen to significantly advance the measurement and value of OTT advertising,” said Scott Rosenberg, VP of Advertising at Roku.

From the release: “Approximately half of the 250 most-watched channels on the Roku platform are already delivering a large amount of advertising-supported content to consumers. This new measurement is an industry first for over-the-top (OTT) devices and will enable marketers to buy video advertising on the Roku platform with the same kind of audience guarantees available with traditional television.”

Roku is the first Connected TV platform to support Nielsen DAR.

Why is Nielsen DAR important?

Nielsen DAR provides a view of your digital audience with metrics comparable to traditional TV ratings such as unique audience, reach, and frequency.

To better target advertisements, audience reporting can be broken down into household income, ethnicity, # of children, level of education, and more.

Plus, you can better align your ads across various screens with reporting for audience viewership for digital, only TV, or both.

With Nielsen DAR, publishers are able to prove their ability to reach certain audience segments and sizes, thus making their content more attractive to advertisers. This means that your ad inventory (content set to serve ads) is much more likely to be matched with an advertiser, and increases the likelihood of higher CPMs.

High ad fill rates are crucial to your bottom line

The fill rate is the percent of time a revenue-generating ad is matched with a publisher's available ad inventory.

For instance, if there are 100,000 views on your videos but only 5,000 ads are served, that’s a 5% fill rate. Low fill rates can be common and mean less revenue for your AVOD video network.

However, using the latest RAF ( Roku Advertising Framework) with the Nielsen ad tag may increase the fill rate to closer to one hundred percent because advertisers now have more information on your audience and will be more likely to fill your inventory. In that scenario, going from a 5% to a 100% fill rate, advertising revenue could increase by as much as 20x. Learn more about the Roku Ad Framework.

How to implement Nielsen DAR on your Roku channel through Zype

 

Content creators first provide Zype with as much metadata possible for each video before inserting ads. More metadata will help maximize audience measurement, which means a higher fill rate with more relevant ads.

 

 

Ask your ad server to provide you with a unique Nielsen DAR application ID and ad tag for Zype to insert into the Roku Advertising Framework. Zype will identify content ID, length and a Nielsen Genre from your video library and input them properly in the advertising tag. Nielsen DAR Genre Tags include tags for bucketing your content into categories such as documentaries, feature films, news, sports, and more. These identifiers will populate an ad response on the server side to deliver targeted ads to channel viewers.

 

 

Once your channel is live in the Roku Channel Store, the Roku Advertising Framework will detect a Nielsen beacon and serve up a targeted advertisement to the viewer.

 

 

Drive your audience to your content with consistent promotions and marketing communications. More viewers means more ad revenue!

 

Connect your video with viewers, everywhere.