We recently completed an overhaul of our video ad support here at AvantLink.
First and foremost, we’ve switched over to using the Flowplayer video player for displaying our videos. We feel that Flowplayer provides a better user experience than our previous player, and it offers a few more features than we had access to previously, like built-in support for viewing videos in full-screen mode. The initial load-time of the player, prior to clicking the “Play” button is faster than our old solution as well, which is a welcome change.
Additionally, with this upgrade we were able to add scripting to make click-through behavior much more obvious to users. Moving the mouse pointer onto the video screen now triggers the display of a message stating that you can click on the video to visit the merchant site. As always, such click-throughs are properly enabled for affiliate tracking, so videos are monetized just like any other text or banner ad.
Take a look at this video below from Brownells.com about their “Uplula Universal Magazine Loader” (a pretty nifty accessory for those handgun users out there) if you want to see these new features in action.
As always, let us know if you have any comments or questions.
-David & AvantLink
I too have been very impressed with flowplayer.
I personally use it as a fallback to HTML 5 video, but for adverts, flowplayer is better than HTML 5 due to plugins such as the content plugin.
One of the nice things about flowplayer, I personally try to avoid using JavaScript whenever possible. While JS is the normal embedding method, you can use the object embed method with json encoded playlist for multiple pieces of media, html 5 video does not support playlists without using JavaScript. That’s probably an advantage for advertising as well.
January 10th, 2010 at 1:26 pm