Week after week I’ve noticed articles about the continued craze of online video. Amazon now offers movie downloads from its Web site, Apple has a new technology that allows consumers to play a video from their computers directly onto their TVs, Google replaced its Froogle tab on its toolbar with Google Video in early August, Blinkx announced on Monday a partnership with Microsoft to power video search capabilities for some sites on MSN and Live.com, and most recently, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars, making it Google’s largest acquisition since the company’s inception eight years ago.

The increase of online video content has simultaneously caused a soar in online advertising. A recent article by Brian Morrissey in AdWeek noted that net video advertisements are becoming more expensive than advertising space on TV. Ad agency executives said that the cost to play an ad before video content now costs anywhere from $25 to $40 per 1,000 plays, which is a 25 percent increase just in the past year. Media execs say that that is comparable to the price to run a similar ad on network television.

Catherine Holahan wrote an article today for BusinessWeek discussing the recent YouTube acquisition and citing that in addition to expanding Google’s user base, the purchase gives a hefty boost to Google’s online video library, searchable content and potential advertiser base, as 65,000 new videos are currently uploaded to YouTube every 24 hours. Holahan also interviewed our CEO, Alex Laats, who discussed our new advertising platform with her and how it relates to search. We were very excited to see that we were the only company referenced in the article in regards to video advertising!

It seems the timing of the release of our advertising platform could not have been more ideal. I think now that we’ve introduced such an innovate option for advertisers, we are going to start seeing similar ones pop up among other search engines. At least we’ll still be able to say we were the “first of our kind!”