Advertising on Youku, China’s largest video host, has its similarities as well as significant differences with YouTube in ways ads are displayed and priced. Here is an overview of different advertising options with Youku with the visual description of how each of them works.
The main attributes of various types of ads running on Youku site is the ad’s location, size, frequency and media type. Prices are based on the combination of those attributes and range between 30 RMB per thousand impressions for a 15 seconds pre-roll ad with CPM model to 250,000 RMB for 24 hours of displaying the largest banner ad on the top of the page.
Here are the most common types of advertising on Youku:
Youku top banner ads
Banner ads can be displayed at the top, the middle or at the bottom of a page, as well as on the right panel’s top or bottom. Here is an example of the top page and top side panel’s banner ads:
Youku mid-page banner ads
Getting to the middle page banner takes a bit of scrolling down and it looks like this:
Youku bottom banner ads
Finally, the cheapest (relatively speaking) are the bottom banners that wouldn’t be visible until a user scrolls all the way down:
Youku pre-roll ads
Those are the ads that are displayed before the start of a video and they can’t be skipped:
Youku mid and post-roll ads
Finally, mid and post-roll ads are displayed during the video at certain times or at the end of it, similar to TV commercials. Since they can be skipped by a viewer they will be priced at much lower rate than pre-roll ones.
Here is an example of a post-roll ad that is displayed upon the end of a clip and will stay on until closed:
Youku pause ads
Pause ads is anther popular choice of adverting on Youku. Those ads are displayed whenever a video is paused. Such ad would stay on until playback is resumed. Those types of ads are usually static but can be quite effective – if the video is paused several times, a viewer will be seeing it every time which increases the impression rate per the same user.
Here is how a pause ad would look like:
Moreover, there is a nice feature of Youku that keeps a small floating frame of the video in constant view every time the page is scrolled down. This means that whenever a clip is paused, a pause ad will stay in view no matter where a user is on the page. Here is how that would look like:
In conclusion, advertising options on Youku although similar to Youtube, are in some ways more versatile and creative. This, however, does make pages look more cluttered and disorganized. On the other hand, Chinese consumers generally don’t consider such apparent clutter a distraction and, in fact, do prefer busy look of sites like Youku to clean and minimalist style that is more effective with Western consumers. Read here more on this particular topic.
