eMarketer is reporting that online video advertising will grow 207% between 2008 and 2011 — to about $4.2 billion.  Assuming that 2007 online video advertising comes in around $800m (based on eMarketer’s previous estimates), this represents a 430% increase from 2007.  By my math, that’s a sustained 52% annual growth rate for online video advertising.

Does this make sense?  Well, the overall online ad market is project to continue to grow at about 30% in the next couple of years, and slow to 12% by 2011.  In the meantime, online video is expected to grow to 13% of the mix, from 8% today.  These numbers seem like a reasonable guess, but they’re only a guess.

The key question is, what’s the long-term portion of ad spending that will go to online media?  And what chunk of that will go to video?

Consumers are spending increasing amounts of time online, and they’re shopping online more and more.  Already people spend as much time online as they spend watching TV.  However Internet advertising spend is way below TV ad spend — TV is around $70 billion today, while online is around $20 billion.   So if anything, the eMarketer numbers seem conservative.

Filed under: marketing, strategy