CoinDesk | 2023

Video Player

Improvements to video player styling, positioning, and features increased engagement and ad revenue.

One of the things I observed when joining CoinDesk was that their ad impressions on video lagged behind plays. This didn't appear to be due to users having an ad blocker installed, but our video player just wasn't the right size, it wasn't in a place that was always viewable to the user, it didn't float when the user scrolled past it, and it wasn't doing anything smart like pausing when not in view.

Statistics like ad completion rate (viewing more than about 3-5 seconds of an advertisement) and ad viewability (having 50% or more of the video player in the viewport when an ad is playing) are important for getting a good payment amount from advertisers. And pausing the video when it's not visible helps the overall stats and costs too.

We're using JW Player (JWP), but a self-hosted version rather than the cloud version, so we couldn't just toggle some settings. And our video experience hadn't ever received much attention from engineering, so I specced out a number of enhancements:

Controls for pausing the video when it isn't in view, and playing the ad when it isn't in view.
A combination of overlay and skinning for the video player to standardize video buttons across the site and make it easier to click the buttons on mobile.
Automatic generation of closed captions and transcripts. The transcripts are automatically added to video pages so they can be indexed by search engines.
Integration with Google's flag for live video to improve placement in Google Video search results when we're live.
Better float position, especially on mobile, to make the video player less annoying.
We hypothesized that people who unmute will watch the video longer, so we added a Big Unmute Button to the top-left of the video player.

The result was a dramatic shift in viewability and completion rates as well as ad impressions. Both viewability and completion rate went up by 20-30% to reach totals of between 70% and 80%. Ad impressions went from often being 30-50% the number of video plays to often being 30%

more than the number of plays.

This brought in in more revenue from video pre-roll advertising and helped make the case to add mid-roll advertisements for longer videos.