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Google, the biggie, announced today of releasing of Video Ads on the website where it caters to image and text based link advertising. Google identifies the huge market for television advertising and thus implemented the much talked about video ads.

For now, Google is not placing video advertising on Google.com or the other sites it runs, but it says it is considering doing so in the future. Advertisers have been eager to buy the relatively limited supply of spaces for online commercials at prices that equal and sometimes exceed rates charged by major networks, as measured by cost per thousand viewers.

Google’s move expands the online advertising space to the network it has established for text and graphical ads - a group of sites whose number it will not disclose, though it is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Google said its system would bring video advertising within reach for small businesses. “A large percentage of video ads will come from small advertisers,” said Gokul Rajaram, a director of product management at Google. “A small resort owner in Maui probably already has video of their great beachfront property. Now they can put it in an ad and reach a qualified set of users.”

Google’s announcement came a week after AOL said it had bought Lightningcast, a company that sells video ads on about 150 sites. Lightningcast will be merged with AOL’s Advertising.com unit, which mainly sells banner advertisements on other sites but is also getting into sales of video advertising.

Traditionally,Lightningcast and other video advertising networks focus on inserting commercials into video programming. The ads Google is placing, by contrast, will appear on conventional Web pages; users will see a single image, and the video will play only if they click a button.

Source: IHT