Contentinople Insider has released a report looking at the web video boom, and traffic to sites that offer video has taken off tremendously. This means that we will likely see a massive shift in web video advertising in the approaching future.

"With skyrocketing traffic to Websites that offer videos, advertisers that once relied only on display and search advertising are turning more to Internet video advertising to reach consumers," notes Steve Donohue, research analyst with Contentinople Insider and author of the report. "However, in order to achieve growth, those that aggregate inventory from multiple Websites must agree on standards for producing and delivering video ads on the Web."

The report shows that advertisers are migrating to new digital networks to support online video following the 2008 trend of consumers flocking to sites that offer it. There are advertising networks that target advertisers with their platforms, as well as others that target Web publishers.

Some other interesting takeaways from the report include:

- Spending on Internet video advertising is poised to take off, with advertisers using pre-roll advertising and other linear ads, in addition to interactive overlay ads to reach viewers.

- Web publishers and advertisers must reduce the cost of running video ads online face in order to sell video advertising.

- The Interactive Advertising Bureau released guidelines for digital video advertising in May 2008, covering several ad formats. The report summarizes these formats.

- While video advertising represents a small percentage of media spending today, it is expected grow to $850 million in 2009.

Online video is still in its infancy. Even YouTube has only recently began playing around with different advertising models. We can expect to see a lot of experimentation and potentially more standard ways to advertise with video as the year progresses, I think.