Online Video Ad Formats and Methods - An Overview

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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 Ads - In this format of advertising, the advertisement clip is inserted before the actual video and while playing the video, the advertisement clip is played first and the viewer is compelled to watch the advertisement before the start of the real video file.

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 Format - With mid-rolls, a short clip is streamed in the middle (sometimes every X minutes) of video content that is playing. This tends to be less annoying to users as they are acustomed to this format in television advertising.

Many of the video platforms have experimented with various differnent 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.

Contextual in-video advertising seems to be the way of the future with many different sites attempting to match videos with advertisements that are most relevant to the subject matter. Users like this format more as well as it does not disturb the experience of watching the entire video. This quality of the format makes it one of the most promising advertising formats for the future and there are many diverse ways in which to serve either images, clips, or text ads.

One of the most popular version of contextual video advertising is that of what is known as the “overlay ad.” In this format, relevant textual ads are scrolled or displayed across a small portion of the video screen (usually the bottom). Users in particular prefer this format as it is relatively unobtrusive.

These are some of the popular and in-use video formats at the present time. But the work is still going on for the development of the new video formats for the future and no real standard has been set. It will be quite interesting to see what the leaders in this space come up with next.

About the Author:

This post was written by Mark Robertson, an expert in video search optimization, video marketing. For more information, tips, and news for online video advertising, visit ReelSEO.

August 29th, 2008 - Posted in Online Marketing | |