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Overview of Online Video Advertising Formats |
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by MarkRobertsonofReelSEO.com
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.
Due to the overwhelming demand from advertisers to develop effective methods for online video advertising delivery, some of the online video sharing giants have implemented various forms of online video ad formats. Historically, in-stream ads, also known as pre-roll ads, mid-roll, and post-roll, have been the dominant standard in terms of the format most advertisers gravitated towards due to the prominence of the ad content itself.
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 Video Ads: In post-roll ads, just like pre-roll, a 15 or 30 sec clip is streamed at the end of a video itself. This is usually launched in conjunction with pre-roll as well as often times, the advertiser never gets their ad seen as users most often only watch part of the 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.
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.
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.
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