Showing and Telling – How Video is becoming the search medium of future

The recently announced acquisition of Joost Assets by ad network Adconion, the largest independent global audience and content network, paints a clear picture of where the online market is heading. True, Adconion has been offering pre-roll video ad distribution for some time, but this move will broaden their reach and further cement their position as a video content and ad distributor.

Joost currently offers videos in categories such as shows, films, music and allows members to upload and share videos. The combination of Joost technology along with Adconion’s client base and reach will make this an interesting partnership. It just goes to show that more and more companies are seeing the value in video related content as a way of reaching audiences.

Here's a statistic for you, YouTube (independent subsidiary of Google Inc ) now averages 20 hours of video uploads per minute. Although much of this content is made of up music videos and home videos, serious businesses and government bodies are realising that video could be the way forward for reaching an ever-fragmenting audience.
In a recent development, Google announced the launch of a YouTube captioning feature that will provide both improved accessibility for the deaf as well as improve search functionality. YouTube captions will be indexed in search engines for keywords placed in the captions which could mark a new opportunity for search engine optimisation.
So, what do these moves mean?

It means that the days of paying attention to only text based content are well and truly over. The writing (pardon the pun) has been on the wall for some time, but 2009 seems to be the year that businesses pay attention to video as a means of reaching people.

Here's a prediction:

• Video related traffic will go through the roof
• Click through rates for video content will rival top text based search results
• Budgets for the creation of video based content will increase and become part and parcel of any SEO strategy
• Display budgets will increase (where they’ve been dropping over the past couple of years thanks to recession induced budget tightening) within the video advertising sector.

So, what's next?

It looks like search engine marketing is taking an exciting turn, with new technology and opportunities popping up every couple of days. So, watch this space, maybe Ambergreen's next post will by an embedded video...