Friday, August 03, 2007

Video Advertising Still an Enigma

Video search engines have yet to figure out the best way of implementing advertisements, and the jury is still out on whether, pre-, post- or mid-roll ads are the best format.

If you compare online video watching to TV, then pre-rolls are not the way to go. There's a reason why when you switch on a channel at x:00 o'clock there aren't any ads -- viewers don't want to start their programming with an ad!

As Amanda Congdon points out, the pre-rolls length should only be a fraction of the length of the video itself, and placing the ads after the content begins is preferable.

I'm amazed that after 10 months of owning YouTube, Google has done almost nothing with video advertising. What happened to the fast-paced world of web innovation?

According to CNN Money, YouTube more than doubled it's traffic in June over a year ago. Google is testing several models, but feels that targeting is necessary.

To start, YouTube should enable viewers to setup a queue with the videos from its search results and use post-rolls in between to monetize the videos. This saves people time over today's process of viewing videos one at a time, and a short spot would be tolerated.

The only thing worse than no traffic is lots of traffic and no revenue stream.

Posted By John Gartner at 10:16 AM
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