With Television selling 30 seconds of airtime during the Superbowl for a whopping $2.4 million, it was only a matter of time before SPAM, pop-ups, and banner advertising weren’t enough for Internet marketers. Ad-supported video will and has started to appear online before and after free or low-cost video downloads. You can see infomercials embedded on the site and even cell phone-ready clips appearing on PDAs and rich-media handheld devices.
According to a recent study, Internet users preferred this type of video to video that asked consumers to pay money for the ad-free version. The benefit of supporting and developing ad-supported video is that, in essence, advertisers will pay for most or all of the download, keeping costs low for consumers and making viewing more free by making ad-supported video available to everyone online.
An initial way to avoid watching these videos is to grab your mouse and “sweep” past the commercials seems easy enough. On handheld devices without play/pause/fast-forward/rewind-enabled touchscreens, skipping ad-supported portions of video at the beginning and end of clips is not an option. This is what makes mobile banner ads so valuable.
New ad-supported video companies are springing up that offer businesses a technological advantage to place their ads on people’s computer screens. Ad Infuse and Minick offer customized mobile advertising and streaming video solutions to Swiss COM mobile customers in Switzerland. Instead of paying for subscription downloads, these mobile users are required to watch a ten to twenty second ad at the beginning and end of each show.
In the UK, one million customers signed up for UK mobile operators’ ad-supported video service in the first six months of service. Rhythm NewMedia designed its streaming service to include short clips of news, comedy, animation, and short films with a pre- and post-broadcast spot. Companies that have signed up include Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Unilever and Nivea. Because a cell phone provides businesses with much more demographic information about consumers than a television, ads are effective in targeting prospective customers and have been very successful.
In addition to knowing what it adds, the mobile user may be interested in the efforts in the US of a company called Audlitude that allows the content owner to view other shows as well as merchandise that they may be interested in purchasing based on their selections so far in the system. This gives advertisers a whole new method to target premium content audiences across the web. In the future possible engines to locate advertising based on GPS tracking devices.
Google also has an ad-supported video trial that embeds ads in an unobtrusive banner on the top page and ends each video with a thirty-second gap. Its main competition in ad-supported video has been Apple’s proprietary iTunes, which is so widely used that it’s easy to transition to incorporate video sales as well. ABC has also done well in online syndication of shows like Lost and Alias.