Analysts from IDC to eMarketer are expecting the market for video ads to rocket to $1 billion or higher in 2008. AdSense for Video, (an extension of Google’s In-Stream Video Ads) started in beta on Thursday, the 21st February, 2008 with about 20 partners’ Web sites including eHow, Brightcove, YuMe, ExpertVillage, PinkBike, TheNewsRoom and Blip.tv.

Advertisers will have to choose between video or text ads, which will be overlaid on the video clip. The text ads will rotate every 20 seconds. Unlike the TV style Preroll ads, overlay video ads are non-intrusive. The overlay/InVideo ads are a semi-transparent video or text ad that pops up on the bottom of the screen in the first 15 seconds. When users click on the overlay, it pauses the video, so they can watch the ad. Once the ad is over, the video will resume automatically. If the overlay is not clicked by the user, the ad disappears in 10 seconds.

I personally believe that 2008 will be year when video will become ubiquitous and present in every vertical & domain. Now 2006-2007 was year of advent of video from user content perspective. 2008 will be marked by the fact that almost every popular site will have video content. I am not sure that ad sense is the best way to monetize video or the preroll ads. I would like to see more innovations on this front- interactive ad model or may be pay per engagement model.

We thought we had the trademark on ‘Buzz’ word . Valleywag got some exclusive screenshots of Yahoo Buzz, which is could be Digg’s next competitor. Yahoo Buzz is supposed to be launching beta on the 26^th of February with an initial 100 sites.

Yahoo Buzz’s Top Stories will be updated hourly as seen in the screenshots. The stories will be ranked based on popular search results and user voting. After the beta period, the sites accepted in Yahoo Publisher Network will appear in Buzz which means that if you allow Yahoo to sell ads on your site, Buzz will allow your stories.

Interesting, Yahoo again is trying Google’s game of linking every product with their Ad Network and incentivizing the ecosystem. The question is that with voting button becoming as common as social networks, can they get enough user base to ‘Buzz it’? We had launched our own niche voting on user generated content site- LifeSolved – based on life and productivity solutions & tips. Our thought was that each one of us have been solving problems we face, in our unique way and it is time to share them with the community.