Video pre-roll ads
Get an 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. It's well established the percentage dropoff rate caused by pre-roll in front of puzzles is in single digits.
For a reference implementation, 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.
If the above option is not possible, PuzzleMe can also be configured to serve pre-roll ads within its iframe. To set this up, you will need to 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.
Pre-roll ads can be configured with both puzzle pickers and single puzzle embeds. With single puzzle embeds, you'll have to modify the embed URL slightly to include a deep link to a specific puzzle and route the load through the picker. With this implementation, the user does not see a picker, but will see the pre-roll ad, followed directly by the puzzle.
For enterprise accounts, other ways of integrating ads within the iframe through Javascript callbacks may be possible if you have custom APIs to invoke pre-rolls. Contact us to know more.
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.