The study found that video advertising increases engagement, doubling Dwell Time (the amount of time users engage with an ad) and increases Dwell Rate (the number of ad impressions leading to users engaging with an ad), by 20 percent.

In the last four years, the growth of video impressions has outpaced rich media growth by 60 percent. Eyeblaster’s data indicates that since the beginning of 2006 to Q2 2009, video impressions have increased more than seven times in the U.S. and tenfold globally.

Highlights from the report include:
   

• In-Stream video ads have the highest proportion of ads fully played compared to any other format.
• Creative decisions play a significant role in ad performance: Rollover user-initiated video performs best followed by auto-initiated video; click user-initiated performs worst.
• Weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm is users’ preferred time to watch In-Banner and Floating video ads.
• Relatively few users un-mute video ads; auto-initiated video has the highest un-mute rate.
• An increase of video length by five seconds reduces Video Fully Played rate by 2.8%, on average.

"When it comes to online advertising, savvy marketers are using video to work both ends of the consumer funnel to drive results," said Gal Trifon, CEO and Co-founder at Eyeblaster.

"Online video advertising provokes engagement and Eyeblaster’s data demonstrates that users are more compelled to play with an ad that contains video. A blend of In-Stream, In-Banner and Floating ads allows advertisers to engage their target audience regardless of where they spend their time online."
Related Articles:

> Google To Get More Interactive With Mobile Video Ads

> IAB Releases Ad Unit Guidelines Updates

> YouTube Videos In Adsense Could Drive Clicks

"In rich media, size is only one component of banner visibility on the site," says Eyeblaster.

"In Standard Banners, by their nature, size is a large component of the ads’ visibility and therefore affects their performance," Eyeblaster adds. "Rich Media ads, on the other hand, have more “dimensions” than two—pixels are augmented by flash, video and expansions that catches the users’ attention. Therefore in Rich Media, size portrays only a part of the performance picture.

A couple of interesting findings from he report include:

- Video improved performance for most rich media ads, by 71% overall

- Expandable strips had the highest interaction rate of any rich media format, followed by expandable banners

"Size is now in the heat of an industry debate, as publishers are offering larger and larger sizes in the hope of increasing the marketing effectiveness of ads on their site," Eyeblaster says in the report. "Advertisers, on the other hand, are faced with options to allocate their budget to either bigger size or other rich media features."

Eyeblaster found that ads that raised awareness of a corporate brand, rather than specific products, had the highest interaction and "dwell rates." More information can be found in the firm’s report. (pdf)

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 Eyeblaster.com

The company will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol EYEB.  In the course of the IPO, it hopes to raise $115 million.  A number like that, and particularly one in an economy like ours, is bound to raise some eyebrows, but on the whole, it doesn’t seem out of line.

Eyeblaster was founded in 1999, making it a bit older than many of the businesses we write about.  It is headquartered in New York, and has locations in 20 other cities worldwide.  Furthermore, the company boasts of ties to entities like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.  Or, to turn to the "real world," Sony, Toyota, and Vodafone.

Impressive, eh?  The one major problem in all of this (from Eyeblaster’s point of view) is that the EU just approved the Google-DoubleClick merger.  As an AFX article notes, Eyeblaster has admitted, "We expect that Google and Microsoft will use their substantial financial and engineering resources to expand the DoubleClick and Atlas businesses and increase their ability to compete with us."

Meanwhile, the stock market is actually doing well so far today – the Dow is up 1.72 percent, the Nasdaq is up 1.90 percent, and Google has gone up by 4.01 percent.