New In-Stream Video Advertising Executions

As video becomes more and more a focal point on the web, countless players are working to find ways to best monetize video without ruining the user-experience, while providing advertisers with worthwhile ROI. This month Yahoo and Google released information on new video advertising executions; Yahoo Video and Google’s YouTube are two of the highest volume video stream hubs, so it’s worth learning more about the options.

Yahoo has a while now sold :30 second non-clickable pre-roll adjacent to an accompanying 300×250 banner; their newly launched products move towards more progressive video advertising models. The first does away with the accompanying banner and creates a clickable call-to-action over the :30 second pre-roll video. The second advertising option creates an overlay banner bar along the top of the video, which can be clicked to pause the video content and drop to a full overlay that offers additional ad content (a game, a form, a :30 sec spot, etc).

Google now has several videos that discuss advertising opportunities across their YouTube property, including targeted banner ads and video-overlays that function similarly to the dynamic content on Yahoo.  Google runs a teaser overlay at the bottom of video content, that can be initiated to expand and provide additional content while the original video is paused.  Google Operating System provides video and descriptions of Google’s options, and discussion of content concerns (they can restrict to professionally produced content, and safe environments).