Online Video Ad Spend to Treble

In 2006, $225 million was spent on video advertising, and research firm eMarketer expects that figure to triple in 2007, to around $800 million. It sounds a lot, but it is still just 4 percent of total U.S. online ad spending.

While the public get handier with their cams, and marketers entertain with viral offerings, there will be an increasingly large audience ready to be tapped.

Google Video has already experimented with in-stream ads, as can be seen in a couple of videos on their site. Both feature very short ads that appear around 30 minutes into the video.

Video search is still in its infancy and small companies, like Podzinger and Blinkx, are using speech-to-text technology. Podzinger recently announced they had upgraded their technology to search YouTube content.

To geographically target your audience via video there is now Geotiser, where users can search for a product or service by location and click through to video ads from contact listings. This recently launched site still has limited location coverage.

Possibly the best interactive, audience-friendly, concept to date is Microsoft’s "click-on ads". Online viewers would be able to click on items being used or worn in the video, such as cars, furniture and clothing, and be taken, by hyperlink, to the relevant etailer.

But are online viewers ready to have commercial content in videos? A recent survey by Burst Media found that over half of online video viewers (56.4 percent) recall seeing advertising in content they had watched. 52.7 percent said that they would typically continue watching video content once they encounter an advertising unit and 40.4 percent said they would usually stop watching.

Interestingly, 27 percent of respondents who stop watching video content once they encounter an advertisement will immediately leave the website.

Tags: video advertising, video search, YouTube