As we all have been reading, online video consumption growth rates have soared over the past year especially due to broadband growth and penetration. As a result, video sharing and video search website have realize a much stronger traffic scenario whereby advertisers and marketers are spending and are poised to spend just short of $1billion in online video advertising this year.

Due to the overwhelming demand from advertisers to develop effective methods for online video advertising delivery, some of the online video sharing giants have implemented various forms of online video ad formats. Historically, in-stream ads, also known as pre-roll ads, mid-roll, and post-roll, have been the dominant standard in terms of the format most advertisers gravitated towards due to the prominence of the ad content itself.

Pre-Roll Ads - In this format of advertising, the advertisement clip is inserted before the actual video and while playing the video, the advertisement clip is played first and the viewer is compelled to watch the advertisement before the start of the real video file.

Post-roll Ads - This format includes the advertisements at the end of the video clip and it is up to the viewer to decide whether to watch the advertisement clip or not. This format of advertisement is being used by certain video sites. However, this is not effective for the advertiser as often times users dont watch the entire video.

Mid-Roll Ads - This advertising format is where the clips are included in the middle of the videos so that the viewer goes through the video advertisement if he is curious enough to see the remaining part of the video, this format is also very popular with many of the video sites.

Many of the video platforms have experimented with various different online video formats. One of these is in-player ads: In-player ads sometimes include relevant text or image advertisements in the space available in video player between the outer margin of the video and the inner margin of the video player.

The buzz in the past year has been with regard to a newer method of video ad delivery that attempts to match relevance by choosing video ads to run with only video that is similar in subject. This is known as contextual video advertising and it can take on a range of different formats with images or text being displayed within a portion of the video window, only being activated when clicked on.

Of all the various experiments with contextual video advertising, one format has taken off and has even become the standard video advertising format that YouTube and many other sites have adopted instead of pre-roll ads. This format is known as the Overlay ad and it is basically a contextually relevant text ad that is shown in a portion of the player and does not annoy users as much as in-stream advertising.

These are some of the popular and in-use video formats at the present time. But the work is still going on for the development of the new video formats for the future and no real standard has been set. It will be quite interesting to see what the leaders in this space come up with next.