• February 7, 2005

Online advertising company Klipmart announced Friday that its full-screen video streaming technology, the "Full Screen Experience," will be available to its clients at no additional charge for the first quarter of this year.

Touting its full-screen offerings, Klipmart claims that users who enlarge an ad to full-screen are more likely to spend more time watching it. Klipmart CEO Chris Young said that 59 percent of full-screen ad viewers watched at least three-quarters of a 30-second spot, compared to 44 percent of viewers of the normal-size ad.

Young attributed the longer viewing time to the fact that users were watching the ads in the more familiar full-screen format, although he granted it was possible that viewers who would click the full-screen option were predisposed to watch more of an ad anyway. Presently, roughly 60 to 65 percent of the ads that Klipmart runs are full-screen enabled.

Most of the Klipmart streaming video ads are revamped TV spots, but, said Young, advertisers are starting to create unique video content for the Web--such as an ad for the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry. The Kerry campaign and Klipmart put together video bites from the footage of the third presidential debate, and created a video ad that was not aired on television, only in Internet spots.

--S.G.