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A report on eMarketer shows online video marketing at a tipping point with growth of 71 percent in 2006. Online video has been made possible by the increasing penetration of broadband coverage. But it has been made explosively popular with Web 2.0 sites like YouTube. Computers are ubiquitous and video cameras almost so. It stands to reason that there is a lot of digital content to potentially be shared. The statistics for YouTube are impressive. With growth from zero to 20 million users in a year, and the fact that it offers unlimited terabytes of content for free, it was only a matter of time before YouTube figured out a way to monetize their substantial monthly investment to provide service.

Of course, it isn’t just the sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Video that are driving the online video trend. Every month additional television content becomes available online. While much of this content is of the paid variety, the television networks are starting to get the Web business model, and they are making some of their content available free or supported with advertising instead of $2 downloads.

In addition, there is the whole social networking environment that is fueling the online video trend. MySpace Video is a considerable player as this Hitwise chart confirms.

With all this enormous growth in online video activity, it only stands to reason that online marketers would begin using more video in their paid messages. After all, you don’t see many 30-second Super Bowl commercials that are series of static slides. However, don’t expect online video advertising to simply be an extension of television advertising formats. It won’t work that way, because the Internet is a more demanding “attention” environment. In fact, one format that is rapidly gaining a foothold is the five-second commercial. This ClickZ article explains.

You will continue to see a great deal of experimentation with online video for marketing purposes. It is here to stay and it will represent a rapidly increasing percentage of the marketing dollars spent online.