Thursday, August 28, 2008

Online Video Advertising Methods and Formats - An Overview

By Mark Robertson of ReelSEO.com


With the incredible rapid growth that online video sharing and video search sites are realizing, more and more advertisers are pumping money into video advertising. According to the latest research, online video advertising revenues in the US are expected to reach $7.1 billion by 2012 which is a 72 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years. In 2008, the projections are just shy of $1billion.

Because of the keen interest of the advertisers towards the online video segment, many video sharing sites have been encouraged to come up with different formats for the placement of video advertisements. The quantum of investment in this segment has fueled innovation of the methods in which video sites are deploying online video monetization and advertising programs. In-stream (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) advertisement formats have been in existence longest and have produced a good share of revenue for online video content producers.

Pre-Roll Format - Ads, typically videos in duration of 15 or 30 seconds are streamed before the video itself plays. This make the advertising incredibly prominent but causes plenty of issues with regard to user friendliness and many studies show this format to be unpopular with users.

Post-roll Format - In post-roll, just like the other in-stream ad formats, a short clip is played and streamed within the player at the end of the video stream itself. This is not as desired by advertisers as they know that many users never watch a video all the way until the end.

Mid-Roll Ads - This advertising format is where the clips are included in the middle of the videos so that the viewer goes through the video advertisement if he is curious enough to see the remaining part of the video, this format is also very popular with many of the video sites.

As stated earlier, due to the demand, many of these video websites have begun to test and offer new, innovative ad solution for video. One of these experimental format is the In-Player ad: With in-player ads the player skin itself can be used to place relevant images or text content for the advertiser so that the ad is displayed for the entire time that the video is played.

One of the most promising video advertisement formats is contextual advertising which attempts to match advertisements with the most relevant content and visa-versa. This ad itself can take of various different forms, in-video banners, lower-thirds, and contextual text overlay advertisements. The nice thing about this particular method is that it does not disturb the viewing of the video and it responds only when the viewer clicks on it.

Some of the video sites like to go through the video and include only relevant in-video text advertisements, which match the contents of the video and at the same time it does not disturb the process of video watching by the viewer. Youtube was one of the first sites to adopt this format as a standard and it is called Overlay Video Ads.

I have given you a brief overview of the most common formats of video ads that are being tested and utilized at the moment. That being said, with growth being what it is, and video discovery as new as it is, we will certainly see many different companies innovating in regards to developing new and exciting formats for online video advertising.

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