Sea-eagle LIVE – last word on ads

This is not really a discussion for birding-aus. Again, I find myself boring most people with the details. Sorry, this is my last word on this. However, it may help people to see a sense of perspective on this issue which has nothing to do with birding but is something controlled by large companies and advertisers …

The jury is still out on this one a bit but the evidence is that there is certainly some public dissatisfaction with pre-roll ads. However, perhaps surprisingly, one study of 2 million online video viewers found only 16% were put off. They noted that “this spiked to 25%” when associated with newspaper and magazine content. This demonstrates another fact – pre-roll advertising affects people less, when the content is unique / the resulting content is very interesting to them and cannot be found elsewhere. Something like a nesting eagle live cam is going to put off less people than average. Let’s face it, the results speak for themselves. Literally millions of people are watching such cameras every day.

In the first 24 hours we had this live feed going:

Number of viewer minutes = 1880 mins Comprising: 82 unique viewers 148 total viewers

This means that, viewers were on the site for an average of 9.5 mins and 55% of people came back for a second look. So on the whole, most people weren’t put off by them, which is consistent with the research.

Although we can express personal dissatisfaction, it remains a fact that people in general, don’t mind and we have received nothing except positive response outside birding-aus.

So let’s not make mountains out of molehills. Let’s not allow a minor concern to detract from the amazing work that Geoff Hutchinson, John Irvine and the guys at BASNA have done to get to this point so far. I think they should be strongly commended and we should avoid anything that might undermine the value of what is generally a very positive project – though there are undoubtedly things that can be done to improve, as there would with anything.

Regards,

Simon.