eMarketer’s is pegging online video revenues at $850M in 2009, but I think it is under-estimating the real contribution videos will make to the web advertising total.

eMarketer’s definition of video advertising includes:

- instream ads (suc as preroll and overlays)
- in-banner and in-text ads

By this very definition, all of the companion 300×250 that YouTube serves alongside the videos they host is excluded in eMarketer’s tally.  YouTube sells two forms of ads: an overlay and a 300×250 ad alongside ad.  While sometimes this 300×250 is a companion ad that is sold along with the pre-roll (something that Tremor Media does, for example), in YouTube’s case (which does not sell any pre-roll ads) the 300×250 would be categorized under display banners.

In other words: the less sold overlay would be included in eMarketer’s ad, but the 300×250 being a simple display ad would not.

Don’t you see a problem?

I think that content is content and if a site plays a video and sells ads around that, that revenue should be allocated to the estimate for video advertising.  I don’t think video content’s value is capped to instream and in-banner/in-text ad as eMarketer measures it… by their definition, they are excluding the majority of the revenue on the world’s largest video site.

Something is off there.