Video Unification: Meet the New, Streamlined Mediavine Video Player

Throughout this Decade of Video, we’ve worked to ensure that Mediavine video ads make you more dollars. Starting today, they’re also going to make a lot more sense.

Let us explain. We’ve previously offered three video options:

1. The Mediavine video adhesion
2. The Mediavine sticky video player
3. More traditional click-to-play Mediavine video embeds

Now, we’ve unified them into one Mediavine Video Player — a single, streamlined, optimally-performing video experience shared between mobile and desktop.

Why are we doing this and how will it help you?

First and foremost, unification of the Mediavine Video Player makes it simpler for our advertisers, our team, and most importantly, our publishers to understand.

It will also be easier to maintain and improve. Instead of adding/tweaking new features for one video offering at a time, our video player updates will be universal.

A unified video player is something we’re excited to unveil now, but it will only improve over time as we can add more features more quickly across the board.

From a user experience standpoint, on mobile, you’ll finally be able to maximize the impact of videos customized to a particular post using embeds.

For example, featured videos aren’t limited to the video adhesion spot. You could run a recipe video on that recipe page, or specific travel videos for different locations

Just as you were able to do this with click-to-play embeds and the sticky player on desktop, this video experience can now be utilized across all platforms.

From an advertising point of view, brands love high viewability, completion rates and large players. Mediavine’s unified player delivers all of the above on all devices.

As far as revenue goes, the unified player no longer competes against the display adhesion. You can finally run both, which should lead to a nice boost on mobile.

How Video Unification Looks

Going forward, if you embed video into a post, it will be running on the Mediavine Video Player; all videos will automatically stick with the user as they scroll past it.

There’s no need for a special sticky or adhesion option for videos.

Note: If you have multiple videos on a page, only ONE can be playing/sticking at a time. All videos can utilize this feature, however, across both desktop and mobile.

New Autoplay Settings

Now that all videos are capable of being sticky, we’ve opened up a new world of autoplay and scroll-to-play options — including on mobile.

We’re pivoting away from the concept of auto-upgrading on desktop or selecting a single mobile video for the adhesion; Instead, we’re just going to autoplay (or scroll-to-play, if it’s below the fold) the first video on the page.

These will be optional for mobile or desktop, respectively, but we strongly recommend enabling both. Wonderful as click-to-play video is in theory, only a tiny fraction of users actually click. If you want eyeballs on your videos, enable both options and autoplay away.

New Optimized Video Placement

It’s no secret that we’re obsessed with page speed at Mediavine, and to the surprise of no one, that’s a major driver behind the new optimized video placement settings.

If you enable this, we automatically ensure that videos appear below the fold, allowing us to lazy load your player and optimize for page speed and user experience alike.

At the same time, we make sure the player is high enough on the page to maximize revenue. We only do this if you enable this feature AND autoplay for that device.

In a sense, you can think of this as a long-awaited merger of the previous auto-upgrade and offset features in Mediavine’s scroll-to-play video player.

Now, rather than having to select a confusing offset, we’re harnessing the power of our in-content logic to figure out the best positioning of the video player.

Perhaps the best part? This allows us to avoid placing it next to an image, or another ad, guaranteeing that it loads seamlessly and works aesthetically on the page.

This is a really exciting feature that we strongly recommend enabling.

It allows you to embed a video anywhere in your post, including recipe cards, and not have to think where it will actually appear — it will be automatically moved and optimized for you.

Featured Videos

We’re still going to support the featured videos that you’ve been able to choose for the video adhesion. These aren’t going away, but like everything else, it will be simpler.

Going forward, it’s simply going to work the same way it did on desktop — that video is going to be inserted into your post automatically as we described above.

That same in-content logic lets us place it into the optimized position, and the video will play once the scrolls down to it, sticking with them from that point forward.

Featured videos will still allow you to set a custom headline to be inserted above them so they make more sense within the flow of the surrounding content.

What will the transition look like for you?

Here’s what’s happening at the onset:

• If you were previously running the video adhesion, we’ve opted you in to the new autoplay setting on mobile.
• If you were previously running either of our sticky player options, we’ve opted you in to autoplay on desktop.
• If you were running a featured video, we left the same one in place.
• We’ve turned on the optimize placement feature for anyone previously running the auto-upgrade feature.

Confused? This is no small change, so please email us at publishers@mediavine.com with any questions.

The long and short of it, though, is that we’ll be actively encouraging everyone to opt in to all four settings, because we feel this is a win-win.

Or win-win-win-win.