Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Online video advertising is increasingly becoming one of the hottest topics on the web. When considering that, you'd think it was the key to monetizing our web efforts. That wouldn't be an accurate picture of what's really happening now.

We talk about this occasionally at thealphamarketer because it is talked about so much, it can give the illusion it's where the real money is being made.

Like an article on BusinessWeek.com recently said, it will probably won't be until after 2011 that it really becomes a powerful force and larger part of online monetization.

Even with the projections of reaching around $4.3 billion by 2011, most of that will be considered an expense by companies and agencies, as it will be for the most part be experimentation that drives those numbers, rather than surety of what to do.

This is important because we need to understand what will be the key monetizer today, while experimenting and building what will be important for tomorrow. Ads that are proven in today's online market, will continue to be the major way of making money for a number of years.

Even when it reaches the projected $4.3 billion, it will only be about 10 percent of the overall Internet ad spend. So this shows that while it's important, and for some categories it will be higher than the 10 percent, overall it will simply be another part of our marketing arsenal. Even in four years it won't come close to being the key driver of online marketing.

Like any other business, we need to focust on today, experiment for tomorrow, and separate the hype from reality. Online video advertising will be important, but only piece of a much larger puzzle for years to come.