Web Video Ad Formats and Methods - An Overview

Article: 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.

Since video sites have been realizing more and more traffic growth, they have had a unique opportunity to innovate and test various different online video ad formats.  And the advertisers as well are more than happy to experiment as they are looking to these leaders to develop the most effective online video advertising formats.  Traditionally, pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll ad formats (aka in-stream ads) have been favored by advertisers due to the availability of inventory and prominence of the advertisement itself.

Pre-Roll Video Ads: Pre roll advertisements start before the video begins and the viewer has to sit through the entire advertisement, if he does not want to rely on chances, rather wants to ensure that ha can watch every single second of the video from its beginning.

Post-roll Format - In post-roll, just like the other in-stream ad formats, a short clip is played and streamed within the player at the end of the video stream itself.  This is not as desired by advertisers as they know that many users never watch a video all the way until the end.

Mid-Roll Ads - This advertising format is where the clips are included in the middle of the videos so that the viewer goes through the video advertisement if he is curious enough to see the remaining part of the video, this format is also very popular with many of the video sites.

As stated earlier, due to the demand, many of these video websites have begun to test and offer new, innovative ad solution for video.  One of these experimental format is the In-Player ad:  With in-player ads the player skin itself can be used to place relevant images or text content for the advertiser so that the ad is displayed for the entire time that the video is played.

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.

Some of the video sites like to go through the video and include only relevant in-video text advertisements, which match the contents of the video and at the same time it does not disturb the process of video watching by the viewer.  Youtube was one of the first sites to adopt this format as a standard and it is called Overlay Video Ads.

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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