Click to enlarge

Video ads on social media and gaming sites have lower dwell rates and lower video fully played rates than they do on news websites, sports sites or those in the music and finance sectors, according to a new research report from Eyeblaster.
In overall good news for video ads, the report found that video ad impressions have grown 60% faster than other rich media ad formats, with dwell times increasing 20% on web pages that contain such ads. Unless, that is, the web page is a social media site such as Facebook.

This less robust performance on social media sites is likely  because people don’t spend as much time on any one single page, according to Eyeblaster's Ariel Geifman (via BizReport). "Users may log in and out multiple times per day, or browse between pages more quickly. As a result, the performance of video ads in these environments is inferior as compared to other environments."

Facebook's Growing Video Presence

Despite these findings as they relate specifically to ads, Facebook is well on its way to becoming a top video viewing destination, according to the latest stats from Nielsen's VideoCensus report, which found that the total time spent viewing video on Facebook has increased by 1,840% year over year. At this rate, Facebook could surpass Hulu to become the second largest video platform in a couple months and eventually take on YouTube, the most dominant video site on the web with over 6.6 billion streams a month (via AllFacebook).
Still Forming

Results from the Eyeblaster study, however, don't mean there's no future for video ads on Facebook. The firm noted that the space is still very small. Even with projected growth of 40% annually, online video ads will amount to only 10% of total online advertising spend by 2012. Moreover, the rules and metrics are still forming, which could further impact these calculations.

Other findings from the report:

• Rollover, user-initiated video performs best, followed by auto-initiated video.
• Click user-initiated performs worst.
• Weekdays from 9am - 5pm is users’ preferred time to watch in-banner and floating video ads.
• An increase of video length by five seconds reduces the video fully played rate by 2.8%, on average.