As we all have been reading, online video consumption growth rates have soared over the past year especially due to broadband growth and penetration. As a result, video sharing and video search website have realize a much stronger traffic scenario whereby advertisers and marketers are spending and are poised to spend just short of $1billion in online video advertising this year.

Because of the keen interest of the advertisers towards the online video segment, many video sharing sites have been encouraged to come up with different formats for the placement of video advertisements. The quantum of investment in this segment has fueled innovation of the methods in which video sites are deploying online video monetization and advertising programs. In-stream (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) advertisement formats have been in existence longest and have produced a good share of revenue for online video content producers.

Pre-Roll Format – Ads, typically videos in duration of 15 or 30 seconds are streamed before the video itself plays. This make the advertising incredibly prominent but causes plenty of issues with regard to user friendliness and many studies show this format to be unpopular with users.

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 Ads – This advertising format is where the clips are included in the middle of the videos so that the viewer goes through the video advertisement if he is curious enough to see the remaining part of the video, this format is also very popular with many of the video sites.

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.

One of the most promising video advertisement formats is contextual advertising which attempts to match advertisements with the most relevant content and visa-versa. This ad itself can take of various different forms, in-video banners, lower-thirds, and contextual text overlay advertisements. The nice thing about this particular method is that it does not disturb the viewing of the video and it responds only when the viewer clicks on it.

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.

These are some of the popular and in-use video formats at the present time. But the work is still going on for the development of the new video formats for the future and no real standard has been set. It will be quite interesting to see what the leaders in this space come up with next.

This post was provided by ReelSEO, the web’s leading resource for online video industry news and information, covering video marketing, video advertising, social media, and much more. For more information about internet video advertising, visit ReelSEO.com

And CUT! That’s a wrap people. Great, now you put your video online and no one sees it. Well, it looks like the work isn’t quite over yet. How do you get people to find your video? That’s what we’re going to tell you right now. Check out these quick tips on getting people to see your videos.

The video, it’s content and quality are only one piece of the entire story. Sure some search engines are claiming to go right into the videos and pull the content out so that Internet viewers can find it, but why make it difficult for them? There are some certain things you can do that will make it far easier. The first of these is sitting down and making some very good descriptions of the content. Then take a look at the content and decide on the best keywords, categories and tags for the video. These are all very important and could be the difference between your video getting 100 views and 10,000. It will not only make the video easier to find for the search engines, but also for the people themselves.

RSS is another great way to get your content quickly indexed by the search engines. If you’re uploading your videos to your own site with your own content management system (CMS) then it probably has a built in RSS feed that you can take the link and submit to search engines. Places like Blinkx, Yahoo and Truveo will accept an RSS or MRSS feed which will tell them when you upload something new. Google Video requires a video sitemap which is also easy enough to do with a little research.

If you’re uploading sites to video platforms and sharing sites the best bet is to get it onto multiple sites. There are some tools that will submit your content to multiple sites and you can find a list of them and a list of video sharing sites at ReelSEO.com where they have multiple articles on both topics. Everyone knows YouTube but you might not know a lot of other places so seeking a little help is OK.

Another great way to get your video out to the masses is to let the masses do it for you. Numerous ways to do this now exist. Entire services like Stumbleupon and Delicious are geared at helping you do that and with a simple plugin for your CMS your viewers are a click away from sharing your content with your friends. Digg might not be the best place for your content but other sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace also provide links via these plugins (or a small bit of code to drop on your site).

You also need to expand your presence on the web by utilizing the tools that have been made for you. Places like Facebook and MySpace are a great way to spread the word about your content. Companies are popping up (like R2 relations) that can help you create a branded presence across the platforms and start driving traffic to your content and site. Another thing you can do maintain a monthly or quarterly newsletter to help your viewers and users find your video by reminding them that it’s there.

Even though your video is done, the quest for an online audience is just beginning. There are services that you can use or if you’re the hands-on type you can do it all yourself just by researching what it is you need to do. Hopefully this has got you on the right track and you’ll have people talking about and watching your video content soon.

Before you dive further into online video, be sure to check out the video marketing experts at ReelSEO, the online video marketer’s guide. Learn more about video marketing, video SEO, video advertising, and general best practices for online video publishing and marketing.