Video pre-roll ads
Get a strategic overview of using video pre roll advertising with your puzzles
Short video pre-roll ads - 6, 15 or even 30 seconds (with a skip ad option) -- have proven highly effective because readers know what to expect after the pre-roll is complete. Puzzles give readers pleasure. They look forward to them. They want the experience of solving a puzzle and the overwhelming majority of solvers are willing to watch a video pre-roll ad before doing so. We've learned that with reasonable length pre-roll, the dropoff rate caused by the pre-roll should be in single digits.
For reference implementations, we recommend the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle or The Washington Post crossword puzzle.
Pre-roll Integration
The preferred way to implement video pre-roll is for the host site to show the pre-roll before instantiating the iframe. This model makes the pre-roll independent of PuzzleMe™ and can be implemented and maintained at your end, allowing more flexibility. This may also provide a better fill rate as the ads are served from a publisher's (authorized) domain.
PuzzleMe can also be configured to serve pre-roll ads within its iframe. To set this up, please provide Amuse Labs with a VAST tag (for example, from DFP Video) using Google's IMA SDK. Test your tag with the Google VAST ads tester, and ensure that it works before submitting it to us. Please note that the ad will run on the amuselabs.com domain in this case. Pre-roll ads served by Amuse Labs are played using the Amuse Labs video player and may be subject to platform limitations.
Other ways of integrating ads within the iframe through Javascript callbacks may be possible if you have custom APIs to invoke pre-rolls. Let us know if you would like to discuss this approach.
If pre-roll is set up within the iframe, it can be disabled dynamically (for example, for users in certain geographies, or for subscribed users) using the iframe parameter &preroll=none.