With the incredible rapid growth that online video sharing and video search sites are realizing, more and more advertisers are pumping money into video advertising. According to the latest research, online video advertising revenues in the US are expected to reach $7.1 billion by 2012 which is a 72 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years. In 2008, the projections are just shy of $1billion.

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 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.

Some of the video sites have started experimenting with different formats like, in-player banners: 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.

The buzz in the past year has been with regard to a newer method of video ad delivery that attempts to match relevance by choosing video ads to run with only video that is similar in subject. This is known as contextual video advertising and it can take on a range of different formats with images or text being displayed within a portion of the video window, only being activated when clicked on.

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.

Although there are a few other formats that are being tested and utilized, the formats that I covered are the most commonly used formats at the moment. That being said, with the attention on this sector as it is, we will likely continue to see rapid innovation and will keep our eye out for the next best online video ad format.

You’ve put time, energy and money into creating your videos and you’ve got them up on the web. Now you’re waiting for people to suddenly find them and watch them right? Well you’ve got a bit more work ahead of your in order to do that. You can’t just sit back and wait for people to find your video content. You’ve got to get your videos in front of the video search engines and the spiders so that they can be indexed. So here are some quick ways for you to help get your videos in front of viewers.w

Keywords „If you don’t have good keywords then you might as well quit now. These are vital pieces of information that will help categorize your videos and make them findable in search engines. When people search for video what do they do? They put words into a text box on a webpage and that’s how they search. So make sure you choose specific words that correctly describe your video and then use those words in the title, description and the keyword areas when you post the video up on the web.

Video Sharing Sites „Let’s face it Yahoo and Google know where YouTube is and might not know where your site is. So if you want people to discover your videos then you should put them where the search engines go. YouTube gets more people searching for videos than any other site on the web. So it’s no surprise that we say you should use them, now is it? There are other video aggregation and search engines where you can specifically submit your videos to and some take single video entries while others use Media RSS files.

RSS and MRSS „Google Webmaster Tools allows you to link sitemaps so that the Googlebots can more easily find your content. RSS is generally used for standard text and image-based content while MRSS is used for media itself, and can really help boost your search results ranking. You see video, like some other forms of content, not only gets indexed separately in some respects but is also seen by certain search engines as better content. But you’ve got to tell them where to find it and what it is and that’s what the MRSS file does.

While these are only three simple ways to get your video search engine optimized they are definitely a start. Making your video easy to find, easy to share and appropriately categorized will definitely be a major help in getting people to look at it. But it’s also got to be worth looking at so the content has to be useful and interesting. There are many other things that you can do to search engine optimize your video online so be sure to take a look around.