I think the way analysts and forecasters have been looking at video is plain wrong.  The notion that video advertising is the sum of instream ads - essentially overlay and pre/mid/post roll ads - is foolish.

Ultimately, video is content… and like text form content, text ads don’t represent the value or future of text content.  Text ads, if anything, are related to search advertising.  Video content is just an evolution of content which will be monetized by a combination of contextual text ads, display ads and yes, video ads.

Unlike TV, which provides for neat little 1-minute intervals to place ads in a 22 minute tranche of content, the Web medium is different, so I am not surprised to see fickle Web users push back on intrusive instream ads.   With the 2009 ad landscape taking a breather, I see publishers being able to scale back the number of ads they will place on a page and be able to charge more alongside premium content… and speaking of premium content - in 2009 - premium content is all about video…  as a result, placing a value on video content by looking merely at video advertising fails to capture the real value of such premium content.

But, I am biased.

Update: not a coincidence to see ESPN taking the opportunity to simplify its site.  But ESPN provides a great example of how video content’s value cannot be measured by the size of instream advertising alone.  ESPN does not run pre-rolls on everything, for example, but the rates it charges for companion ads around that content is considerable.

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