Online ad viewability levels fall again in Europe

In the UK, online viewability levels fell from 52 per cent in Q3 to 50 per cent in Q4 2015, delivering the stark soundbite that half of all ads delivered online now go unseen. In Germany levels fell from 61 per cent to 58 per cent, France 69 per cent to 65 per cent, and in Austria the largest decline from 70 per cent to 65 per cent.

Anant Joshi, director of international business for Meetrics, said that in Q4, “around £134m was wasted on unseen banner ads in the UK alone.”

But there were some positive data points given in the deeper drill-down into the UK figures. The report also revealed that over the last couple of years, the average amount of space taken up by advertising on web pages was just eight per cent, indicating that the ‘ad-clutter’ is much less significant than people believe it is. It also showed that for other formats, such as half page ads and ‘Billboards’, viewability levels were significantly higher at 63 per cent and 59 per cent.  

With a recent study from GlobalWebIndex showing that 40 per cent of people are interested in blocking ads on their mobiles in the future, things look set to get worse before they get better.

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