The Growth in Online Video Advertising

Online video advertising is playing an increasingly important role in the marketing strategies of many companies, both small and large, and it has also begun to have an increasingly significant impact upon the experience of all internet users.
Online advertising can include the use of video advertisements attached to the start of the video or inserted as advertising breaks in a similar way to normal television. Advertisers can also place adverts on webpages alongside internet videos.

The spread of high-speed broadband and the development of new portable devices for the viewing of videos have played an important role in the increasing use of online video. Video has also begun to be incorporated into normal televisions through internet TV. More and more people are becoming aware of online video and they are choosing to make use of it.
The way that viewers are watching online videos is changing. It's becoming a far more mainstream medium. Rather than being something that people only watch when they need to take a break for a few minutes at the office, online video has become a medium through which people watch entire programs and feature films. This is reflected in the viewing figures, which now peak at weekends rather than midweek.

Growth in internet video consumption has been increasing rapidly for some time, with a 40 percent increase in usage between 2009 and 2010. This growth continued in the year 2010-2011, with the amount of time that internet users spend watching videos on their computers having increased by approximately 45 percent over the last year, although this increase was largely due to increased viewing of videos online by existing users than through an increase in the number of people watching videos online. The number of viewers of online videos has also increased between 2010 and 2011, but only by 3.1 percent.
As of January 2011, there were approximately 14.5 billion video streams online. This marks an increase of 31.5 percent from the previous year. During November 2010, videos online were reaching an audience of approximately 172 million people, with about 35 billion videos being watched online in that month alone.

Spending on online advertising has already exceeded 28 billion dollars and it is continuing to increase rapidly, with many new companies turning to online video advertising as a way of reaching their customers and money potentially being directed away from other types of marketing and towards online video advertising instead. The future of video marketing in likely to involve increased spending and usage of this medium.