Myth: 70% viewability means 70% of people saw your ad

Myth: 70% viewability means 70% of people saw your ad

No. The IAB standard is 50% of pixels on screen for one second. That's the bar. A native unit can fly past during a fast scroll, technically "viewable," and register exactly zero in a human brain. Viewability measures whether a pixel had the opportunity to be seen — not attention, not recall, not a glance.

Vendors sell you 70%+ viewability like it's engagement. It isn't. Attention-measurement firms put actual eyes-on-creative far below the viewability number, often by half. So when your campaign "hit viewability targets" and still flopped — that's not a mystery. You bought a pixel-presence metric and expected a human-attention outcome.