Today’s average:
Professional long form video: $40 CPM
Professional short-form: $30 CPM
User-generated video: $15 CPM

Projected for 2013:
Long form: $46 CPM
Short form: $34 CPM
User-gen: $17 CPM

States SAI’s Michael Learmonth:

We’ve heard YouTube is having trouble getting even $15 for overlay ads on the few videos it can actually sell.

All this could change next year if advertisers embrace user-generated video or long form video ad rates go down a bit and become more comparable with TV. Still, these seem like reasonable benchmarks.

Michael is a smart guy, but he’s downright high if he believes that (in his defense, he says “if” and not “when”), and steadfast, Diffusion is plain wrong for basic economic reasons, mainly:

There is NO way that UGC will fetch rates anywhere near what Diffusion is projecting… for one, advertisers won’t go near it and won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole… Most importantly, the sheer supply of UGC is 100 times larger than that of short form professional content, so the price for that will be much higher than simply 2 times UGC.