Thursday, January 8, 2009

Internet Video Advertising Overview - Video Ad Options

By Mark Robertson of ReelSEO

As we all have been reading, online video consumption growth rates have soared over the past year especially due to broadband growth and penetration. As a result, video sharing and video search website have realize a much stronger traffic scenario whereby advertisers and marketers are spending and are poised to spend just short of $1billion in online video advertising this year.

Since video sites have been realizing more and more traffic growth, they have had a unique opportunity to innovate and test various different online video ad formats. And the advertisers as well are more than happy to experiment as they are looking to these leaders to develop the most effective online video advertising formats. Traditionally, pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll ad formats (aka in-stream ads) have been favored by advertisers due to the availability of inventory and prominence of the advertisement itself.

Pre-Roll Video Ads: Pre roll advertisements start before the video begins and the viewer has to sit through the entire advertisement, if he does not want to rely on chances, rather wants to ensure that ha can watch every single second of the video from its beginning.

Post-roll Ads - This format includes the advertisements at the end of the video clip and it is up to the viewer to decide whether to watch the advertisement clip or not. This format of advertisement is being used by certain video sites. However, this is not effective for the advertiser as often times users dont watch the entire video.

Mid-Roll Video Ads: Again, like the other in-stream ads, mid-roll streams a short video clip within the video player itself, only with mid-stream, the ad gets played in the middle of the video almost like a normal TV commercial. This seems to be somewhat less offensive to users.

Many of the video platforms have experimented with various different online video formats. One of these is in-player ads: In-player ads sometimes include relevant text or image advertisements in the space available in video player between the outer margin of the video and the inner margin of the video player.

The buzz in the past year has been with regard to a newer method of video ad delivery that attempts to match relevance by choosing video ads to run with only video that is similar in subject. This is known as contextual video advertising and it can take on a range of different formats with images or text being displayed within a portion of the video window, only being activated when clicked on.

Of all the various experiments with contextual video advertising, one format has taken off and has even become the standard video advertising format that YouTube and many other sites have adopted instead of pre-roll ads. This format is known as the Overlay ad and it is basically a contextually relevant text ad that is shown in a portion of the player and does not annoy users as much as in-stream advertising.

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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