Editor’s note (September 2026): this post was published in December 2015 and its figures are of that period. The abandonment finding it cites is from Krishnan and Sitaraman’s 2012 ACM IMC paper “Video Stream Quality Impacts Viewer Behavior”, which measured a 5.8% increase in abandonment for each additional second of startup delay beyond two seconds — per second, not per percent, and not specific to a two-minute video. The 52% revenue figure and the 1.78X and 2% buffer-rate figures are 2015 estimates that we have not been able to re-derive from current data. Current SmartVideo plans, trial, and terms are on our pricing page.
Possible suspects
If you had to guess what could possibly be damaging your video ad revenue by more than half, you might think it to be one of the following things:
- Incorrect targeting
- Not enough ad inventory
- Low CPM categories
- Ad Blockers (has to be right?!?)
All incorrect
The actual answer is something much more core to the experience, video performance.
Gone in under 5 seconds
Take a look at a chart from a recent report by Akamai. It shows that on fast connections, people will abandon your video in under 5 seconds if there is even a small amount of delay in video load time.
5% abandonment for every 1% delay
That’s right, you will lose 5% of the audience for every delay of 1 second on a two minute video.
Great, but I use a content delivery network
Awesome, that is the first important step to combatting this issue as content delivery networks are a great way to help ensure your video gets delivered from servers nearby to your users.
52% revenue loss is with CDN
Even with a content delivery network, you will still see video buffer rates of around 14–28% and that means you are still losing at best 52% of your ad revenue because of video delivery.
Fix it and double your revenue
Video delivery is complex and cannot be solved only at the network level. That is why we focused on extending the solution into the video player and we have been able to reduce average buffering rates to as low as 2% for our customers. For an ad supported business this translates to increasing your ad revenue by 1.78X.
2% Buffer Rate => 1.78X Revenue
