Video advertising becomes popular on the internet

The growth of internet advertising market is forcing advertisers to look for the new possibilities in the online advertising.

One of the innovations in interactive advertising is video banners. This form of advertising started in United States two years ago and now it is becoming more and more popular in East European region.

Video banners are standard internet banners of any size and shape with integrated streaming video clips with or without a sound. Video with sound starts streaming only after user initiation: on mouse over or on click.

The main reason why video advertising in internet started growing only now is technical barrier. Earlier, users had too slow internet connection for viewing good quality video banners. Today the majority of users in Baltic region have 128 kbps or faster internet connection: this is enough for streaming good quality video files.

Video advertising in internet is one of the fastest growing forms of advertising. In United States advertisers spent 121 million dollars in 2004 and 198 million dollars in 2005. In 2008 advertisers can spend about 509 million dollars for video advertising online.

Main clients of video advertising are entertainment business - movies, concerts, bands, etc. In year 2005 clients of other business areas started using video banners too: „Pfizer“, „Procter & Gamble“, „General Motors“, „Johnson & Johnson".

Online video banners started in Lithuania in July 2004. The first project of online video advertising was implemented by advertising network AD.NET and interactive marketing solutions company "Interactive Marketing Partner Baltic".

Although majority of video clips for video banners are adopted from TV spots, the video clips especially created for internet are becoming more and more popular.

Internet users are very active members of society so surprising them is a big challenge. However video banners are very interesting for them. You can expect that about 50 percent of unique users will initiate the streaming of a video by themselves in order to view the video clip in the banner.