Online video 'could lead to more ad spending'

21st August 2008

The growing popularity of online video clips - thanks in part to comprehensive coverage of the Beijing Olympics - could lead to an 55.9 per cent increase in video ad spending this year, according to an analyst.

Business Week reported yesterday (August 20th) that David Hallerman of eMarketer claimed that major sports events such as the Olympics "need a large place online" as internet video coverage becomes more mainstream.

He suggested that the Olympics could provide a good model to demonstrate the potential of an advertising campaign launched alongside coverage of a major sporting event online.

During the first 12 days of the Olympics, more than 56 million video streams were viewed on a dedicated Beijing 2008 page set up by US television network NBC - a figure more than the combined total of visitors who viewed online coverage for the 2006 games in Torino, Italy and the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.

Figures compiled by Neilsen Online indicate that while NBC's Olympics site had received 47 million unique visits by August 18th, Yahoo!'s Olympic site emerged as an even stronger performer, with 52 million unique visits.

A total of eight million of these visits were made during the first three days of the event.