Microsoft cracks Ads on Web Video?

The big news at MSN Video is that the site has embraced a "Time on Site" traffic metric that's sure to represent the future of advertising. Neilsen announced this summer that they are replacing page views with time on site as the primary web traffic metric. It's widely acknowledged that AJAX and online video are making pageviews less and less relevant all the time. While other sites (like YouTube and MySpace) keep pumping out the pageviews and trying to figure out how to best run ads - this new MSN Video site has hit on a formula that will likely represent the video portal of the future: AJAX powered video playlists, including recommended videos, that do not require new pageloads and are monetized by time-based advertising.

How the Ads Work

Visitors to MSN Video now see a pre-roll ad before their playlist of videos and then are shown another ad at most once every 3 minutes, regardless of the number of videos they have watched. It's much better than standard pre-rolls and sure to be more effective than post-roll ads.

The fact that the pre-rolls are unskippable needs to change, and 3 minutes still seems awfully frequent for ads - but the point is that this is advertising no longer tied to pageviews.

What impressed me was the performance. Turns out I can right-click, hit F11 and watch the news practically full screen in reasonable quality, without any pauses. That's nowhere near possible with YouTube or Google Video, where I usually either let the whole thing download before trying to watch it, or just download the FLV file with FlashGet.

Of course, that may be because YouTube is overloaded while MSN Video is a ghost town, but it's still pretty impressive.

Either way, it would be a great demo for Microsoft's Silverlight technology.... except it's actually done in Adobe Flash 9!