The IAB and Media Ratings Council’s recommendation is that 50% of an ad must be in view for at least one second. Just 49% of ads measured met that criteria. This is an improvement on the 47% from the second quarter of 2016.

However, the UK remains significantly behind other European countries in terms of viewability levels: Austria is at 69%, France at 60% and Germany at 59%.

Based on IAB/PwC’s recently published adspend figures, this costs advertisers around £154m. 

“To be honest, due to the attention and initiatives focused on addressing viewability, we’d expected a bigger improvement in the UK in the third quarter,” said Anant Joshi, Meetrics’ director of international business.

“However, it seems that these efforts only just outweigh the impact of programmatic ad delivery and the amount of ad re-loading done by publishers to boost inventory levels. It’s still translating into about £615 million wasted annually on non-viewable banner ads alone.”