Video Advertising Conundrum
March 18th, 2008 | by Brad King |Coming home from South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), I was struck by the number of regular joes and joannies who have moved into the video blogging space. I’m using vlog generically because folks like Gary over at Wine Library label what they do a blog — it feels different. Maybe it’s not, but it feels that way.
The talk of the day has been about monetizing these smaller videos, particularly since large media companies haven’t quite cracked the code for making money. The good folks at Google are making a big push to develop the inventory from YouTube to delivery advertising, but right now, the approval process is still murky.
What we do know is that advertisers are far from excited about attaching their ads to random selections.
Google has been promoting new video formats and nontraditional campaigns to make money off its $1.76 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006. But it has beentreading carefully for fear of alienating users and advertisers at the Internet’s most popular video-sharing site.
What we do know is that people are expecting ads to show up, even if they aren’t happy about it. The real issue is that most folks ignore the tv-like ads that run in front of many clips. This is a problem for advertisers, who have been reticent to jump whole-hog into the video advertising real.
Spending on online video ads represents less than 4 percent of all Internet advertising and just 1 percent of the amount spent on TV, according to eMarketer. But growth is expected — with the research firm forecasting U.S. spending more than tripling to $4.3 billion in 2011 — especially as more viewers embrace full-length TV episodes and other
video online.
The major players — AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google — are all trying some form of MS’s MSN Video and Atlas AdManager, which is not that dissimilar from Mochila’s business market.
The hybrid ad serving platform will use Atlas AdManager to serve local video ads that will be sold directly by the OVN affiliates. National video ad inventory will be served by Microsoft adCenter and sold exclusively by the Microsoft advertising sales force.
