adscale, Germany's largest ad market, has released its bi-annual report on the state of the German display space. The data released in the report contains some interesting trends from Europe's biggest market, and signs showing that the real-time ad market is starting to get real traction.

More demand is pushing pricing/RTB/CPM significantly higher than for traditional media buying. Publishers and advertisers are increasingly looking for quality on the German digital advertising market. In the first half of 2012 this led to a notable rise in the price level at adscale. Through June 2012, prices rose by an average of 24% over 2011, and 57% compared to the first half of 2011. The main reasons for this are the steadily high demand for high-attention formats, the boom in video advertising, a strong increase in targeted campaigns in the standard formats, and the successful launch of RTB. These are the findings of the current adscale Analyzer 2/2012, the only study of pricing on the German online advertising market.

Real-time bidding impacting prices

Since April of this year, adscale has also been selling advertising on its website in real-time. In the first months (April through July) the CPM for ad space bought through real-time bidding averaged 60% higher than the average CPM of campaigns bought on the traditional marketplace without RTB.

Matthias Pantke, CEO, adscale comments: “We already make up to 10% of our daily revenue with real-time auctions. For the year as a whole, we assume that about 15% of all ad impressions on our marketplace will be from real-time bids.”

Video advertising: autoplay is out, pre-roll video ads are in

The demand for video advertising remains high. In the first half of 2012, adscale made 16% of its revenues through video formats (compared to 10% in 2011). Contrary to common prejudice, most users watch pre-roll ads in their entirety from start to finish. The full view rate (FVR) of pre-rolls that play immediately before video content, and hence are actively accessed by users, averages around 80%. That means that four out of five users see the entire video ad, and it makes no difference whether the pre-roll comes before professionally produced content or user-generated clips. Autoplay video ads, which start automatically when a user accesses a website, do not have these high view rates. Since users do not actively decide to consume the video content, only one in five (20%) watch the ad to the end. Interstitials, which also start automatically, likewise have a low full-view rate of 25%.

All information on trends in the online advertising market and a Special with key numbers on the five-year history of adscale are available for download here.

Average monthly figures are presented in every case. Example: 4.9 billion ad impressions were offered on adscale in June 2012. In the same month, 2.5 billion ad impressions or 46% were actually sold (utilisation = percentage of total available inventory that was sold). Utilisation on adscale is not equivalent to the total utilisation of publishers and marketers.

Data collection methods

The calculations of the adscale Analyzer are based on real-time data from the online marketplace database, and show the supply as well as the actual bookings made on the online marketplace. The goal of data collection is to make the online advertising market more transparent. With a reach of currently 11 billion page impressions per month, 42.6 million unique visitors (74.8% of German Internet users per comScore, July 2012) and a portfolio of some 5,000 websites, the adscale Analyzer shows industry-relevant trends and developments.