Since its launch in 2008, HTML5 has quickly gained widespread adoption and is now becoming the standard for developing digital creatives. The advertising industry is responding, and increasing numbers of advertisers and agencies are building HTML5 creatives.

If you’re a publisher, this means you’ll want to make your site HTML5-ready and help advertisers get up to speed on developing these new creatives. We know the transition from Flash to HTML5 will require some short-term work on your part, but we’re here to help you and advertisers with the process.

What’s so great about HTML5?

HTML5 has seen high adoption rates for a number of reasons.

One key to its popularity is that HTML5 offers strong cross-device support—the language works well on a variety of browsers and mobile devices. This is hugely important now that more people are searching on mobile devices than on desktops.

HTML5 also plays higher-quality video faster—with an average bandwidth reduction of 35 percent. YouTube notably began defaulting users to its HTML5 player this January.

Browsers have taken note of HTML5’s speed and other benefits and have begun introducing power-saving plugins and reducing support for Flash. To increase page-load times, Chrome recently began auto-pausing Flash content that is not a primary part of a page. Safari had already done this and Firefox blocked Flash from auto-loading in July.

Getting ready for HTML5

With the web moving quickly in the direction of HTML5, here some steps that you, as a publisher, can take to prepare for this transition:

  1. Update your creative specifications: Explicitly include HTML5 as a supported technology and increase associated file-size limits to support large HTML5 creatives.
  2. Educate advertisers: Share the benefits of HTML5 and provide HTML5 creative specifications to your advertisers so they can build creatives that work on your site.
  3. Train your teams: Educate your team about HTML creative specifications and let them know what to do when they receive HTML5 ads from advertisers.
  4. Assist advertisers: Share free HTML5 ad conversion and creation tools with advertisers to ease their transition to HTML5.

All of this and is covered in our new guide to help publishers move to HTML5. If you’re looking for more information as you’re transitioning to HTML5, check out the HTML5 resources and HTML5 Toolkit on the Rich Media Gallery.

Also, our Doubleclick Rich Media team is kicking off an HTML5 Hangout series, where over five weeks we’ll set aside an hour to explore topics ranging from how to QA HTML5 ads to building dynamic creative (See the complete Hangout schedule). The first hangout is on September 10th (3pm - 4pm EST) and will introduce you to HTML5 development tools and best practices. Register here.

We know that change can be hard, so we want to make your move to the future of digital advertising a bit easier.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick