Today’s video advertising experiments will be tomorrow’s surging market
It doesn’t matter if you’re watching your favorite baseball team, soap opera, movie or sitcom on TV—the commercials are always annoying.
For years we have sat back and taken it. Sometimes we’d change the channel, other times we’d leave the room, but enough of us responded to those ads to excite marketers into paying millions of dollars for them.
The traditional television commercial format isn’t working online, though, and entrepreneurs are getting more experimental.
A recent Wall Street Journal article illustrates the many ways that advertisers are trying to find the “Holy Grail” of online video ads—an ad that will invoke a good response rate without annoying users.
The article is both interesting and exciting. It describes four different video ads that are being tested and cites eMarketer Inc.’s projections that “U.S. spending on Internet video advertising will rise to $4.3 billion in 2011 from $410 million last year.”
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Four of the ad formats are described below. Perhaps they could help you monetize video content on your website or build your audience from online video viewers.
Pre-Rolls – The ads most familiar to online video viewers, pre-roll ads run before video content is played. An example can be found at the video section of MSN.com .
Tickers – These ads run during a video toward the bottom of the screen and are similar to the headline tickers for television news broadcasts. They are usually hyperlinked to more information about the product and remain for the duration of the video. An example can be found at VideoEgg.
Player Skins – This advertising platform surrounds a video that is playing. An example can be found at Husky Network and three other examples can be found about halfway down this page at Zambooie.
Bugs – Bugs are similar to tickers, but they do not stay for the full duration of the video. Here’s an example from Break.com.
There were several other ad formats mentioned in the article like post-roll ads and commercial breaks in the middle of short videos. These formats don’t seem likely to gain much traction, though.
Take a look at the articles linked above and see if any of these new ad formats could help you bring in more customers or monetize online video. The price of using them is only going to increase as more people watch video online.
