You hear lots of talk about viral web video marketing and get excited about the possibilities. "What if we can get our target audience sharing videos we produce and self promoting our ideas and products?". It adds a lot of mileage to the return on investment for the initial video production. With viral video marketing the first step is getting your video in front of a wide enough audience to make a dent.

This means adding it to all of the major video communities, and directing customers to the video via PR and announcements. We typically also keep an eye on video search engines to see how complete and quickly updated they are.

One of the most popular video search engines, Blinkx, recently added AdHoc, a new ad program that encourages viewers to share there favorite videos.. This obviously helps spread the word on new video presentations.

Below is a list of video search engines that you may not have heard of yet:
We arleady mentioned Blinkx
Truveo
Fooooo - A leading video search engine from Japan
Dabble - Community driven, includes everything from vlogs, to movies shot on phones, and professionally produced videos
EveryZing - Uses a one of a kind audio translation technology
Pixsy - Images, Audio, Video

It always interesting to see how videos are categorized and how the channels are broken down.....

A report released by eMarketer.com claims that online advertising revenues will increase to $775 million dollars by the end of 2007. Since the dawn of online video communties such as YouTube and MySpace, you are constantly hearing discussions of the video boom. For example, Businessweek.com released an article today discussing the eMarketer report. As a company that deals in online video production, we find this to be exciting news but have to constantly remind ourselves that online video communities aren't filled with advertisements.

We give a huge amount of credit to the web video communities for constructing a creative, shared environment that is very entertaining and user driven. Video advertising is currently not going this route. Instead, it serves as a precusor to interesting video content. For instance, when you see an interesting headline on Yahoo! but have to watch an ad first to get to the interesting video. That strategy flies in the face of what users like about these video communities. Forced exposure to your message is a turn off.

It is important to recognize that online video presentations can be very dynamic and should be used to engage users. Don't deliver the standard "auto pilot" TV formats. Give options and control of the presentation to the user. Our theory is if your viewer glosses over parts of the presentation / advertisment they aren't interested in because they want to navigate to a section they are interested in you will make a much longer impression. The alternative may be losing their attention and possibly not gaining it back.

A recent study by the Online Publishers Association found that 1 in 4 web users view online videos at least once a week. Of those viewing online videos, 66% have watched web video advertisements. 44% of those viewers took action on what they saw. These statistics show that a large base of users find online video advertising appealing.

In addition to this trend, an advertising medium such as online video advertisements has inherent advantageous attributes. Using tailored web-marketing techniques your audience can be targeted to your specific consumer base. The amount of viewers can be directly measured and the proceeding actions of those viewers can be tracked.

Summarized well by Cari Weissberg, VP and Group Media Director of Universal McCann Interactive.

"Online video is an extremely powerful advertising tool - combining the emotional impact of TV with the measurability of online advertising,"