You’ve heard the standard: 50% of an ad’s pixels, in view, for at least one continuous second. That’s the industry benchmark for viewability. It’s also the bare minimum. And it tells us very little about whether a user actually saw the ad – let alone engaged with it or remembered it.
Let’s start with what everyone agrees on: ad quality matters. It matters for advertisers trying to get results. It matters for publishers looking to maintain credibility. And it matters for the end users – yes, the ones we’re all supposedly optimizing for – who just want to read the content they came for without being bombarded, interrupted, or ignored.
The days of vague attention metrics are officially over. The Media Rating Council (MRC) and The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are finally teaming up to standardize attention measurement, marking a significant milestone in the publishing industry. At this stage accreditation guidelines are expected to roll out in early 2025, this is huge news for publishers, and it’s happening just in time.
