Outstream and In-Read Video, Bought on Attention

Start with the exclusion list: Outstream and in-read video clears at roughly $8 to $18 CPM, and a substantial share of what is sold as outstream never meets the MRC video standard of two continuous seconds with half the pixels in view. The ANA's 2023 programmatic transparency study found around 15 percent of measured spend landing on made-for-advertising sites, and outstream is where that concentrates, because a page built to hold four video players is built for the buyer and not the reader. So this work begins with a domain exclusion list, and you receive that list before you commit to anything, whether or not you go on to hire me. How it is bought: Allowlist first, exchange second. Buying is against attention seconds and in-view time using Adelaide or Lumen data rather than completion rate, which measures the player's behaviour rather than the viewer's. Pre-bid viewability targeting on video carries a real CPM premium, and I would rather spend that money on a tighter domain list that removes the problem instead of filtering it. Seller paths are checked; the same publisher reached through four supply paths is one publisher and three tolls. Creative that survives the format: Sound-off with burned-in captions, since these units start muted. The brand inside the first two seconds, because that is all most impressions deliver. Six and fifteen second masters in 16:9, 1:1 and 9:16. No thirty second cut runs in outstream regardless of what it cost to produce; the format will not hold it and the money goes to a player that scrolled past. Category judgement: On health publishers, standard keyword blocklists remove a third to a half of appropriate inventory, because the blocked term is usually the condition your product treats. I rebuild that list against page context rather than keyword matching and hand it to your brand safety vendor with the reasoning attached, so it survives the next review. In legal, outstream inventory sitting beside legal editorial attracts co-registration and lead-farm domains that look like publishers and behave like arbitrage; those go on the exclusion list on day one. Pet content is the cleanest of the three, with the caveat that a large share of the traffic is syndicated slideshows where the video is the only reason the page exists. What I refuse: No open exchange run without an allowlist. No inventory from the known made-for-advertising lists, even at a CPM that makes the blended number look excellent. Video completion rate is not reported. No autoplay with sound. And I will not chase a CPM target under about $6, because at that price the only inventory available is the inventory this practice exists to keep you out of. Not included: Creative production, though you will get the specification the format requires. In-feed video on YouTube, Meta and TikTok. Connected TV, which is separate work with a separate engagement. Influencer and branded content. Publisher direct sponsorship negotiation. Who this is not for: Brands that need a last-click return figure to defend the line internally, since outstream is an upper-funnel unit and reporting it as anything else is a favour that ends badly. Teams whose media buying is judged on cost per thousand. Anyone who has been running outstream happily on a 92 percent completion rate and does not want to know what sits underneath it. What arrives: The exclusion and allowlist files in a format your trading desk can import directly. Attention benchmarks for your category, so the next quarter has something real to be measured against. A creative specification sheet. And in the retainer, a monthly supply path review, because the domains that need excluding change faster than any list stays current.