The online video advertising market has reached a pivotal stage. More and more users will flock to the online video medium, creating great opportunities for innovative companies. While the revenue size of the opportunity is rather small today, the most important metric–consumer use–continues to skyrocket. For this reason, it should be of significant interest to both Microsoft and Google. More

Superpages.com, Yellow Book USA Inc., and AT&T Inc.’s Yellow Pages already offer listings on the Web. Now these companies and others are beginning to offer online videos, allowing advertisers to post versions of their TV commercials alongside their Web ads. The directory companies are even offering to produce new videos for businesses, which run as long as two minutes on some sites. In a video posted on Superpages.com for Kent Floral in Kent, Wash., the camera pans a flower shop where a baby holds a yellow flower and an announcer declares, “We’re not your typical dot-com florist.” More

Despite its ubiquity and budget-busting billion-dollar-plus price, YouTube has yet to pay off for Google. So Google, the world’s largest advertising company with a market cap of $160 billion, has announced that monetizing YouTube is its number one priority for 2008. More.

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising, as its revenue grows sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate of 49.4%. Brand advertisers will shift significant amounts of money into video commercials, primarily from broadcast television and to a lesser extent from cable television. More

By Amir Ashkenazi, Founder of shopping.com

The emergence of online video as a mainstream source of both news and entertainment has been a global phenomenon of immeasurable proportion. From industry pioneers such as YouTube, MySpace and Metacafe to more recently created platforms like HULU, Joost and Bit Torrent, Web surfers from around the world are flocking to online video portals at an unprecedented rate.

According to ABI research, over 1 billion people across the globe will regularly watch video content of some sort on the Internet by 2013. In the United States alone, Forrester Research has reported that video advertising will surpass $7 billion by 2012, constituting a 72% growth rate in the market. These numbers, while measuring different entities of the online video revolution, clearly support the notion of the global growth of online video that will be advantageous to both publishers and advertisers. More