Consumers care more about what's in a brand video than how long it is. That's the conclusion of a new study from Invodo tracking consumer response to e-commerce and shopping videos. Invodo is an online video e-commerce company with clients including Office Depot, Toys R Us, and Verizon. Invodo surveyed more than 1,000 online consumers who had watched product videos on retail and brand sites, and the results showed that several common assumptions about online video don't hold up. For instance, many experts say 30 seconds is the ideal length for videos, but Invodo found that about 37% of consumers …

Online video buying platform TubeMogul is slated to roll out a new set of brand protection tools for marketers in an effort to make real-time bidding more palatable for brands. As more money flows into online video, vendors are moving quickly to offer additional capabilities to weed out bad placements so that advertisers are comfortable buying online video in various ways.

Who needs the Super Bowl? For the ads, that is. They're all online in advance. Okay, not all of them. But enough to get the buzz going. And I'm calling it - "The Bark Side" is the best commercial this year. Volkswagen pre-released it Jan. 18 and had earned more 8 million views after just one week. The video features a chorus of dogs barking Darth Vader's Imperial March. Volkswagen has said this viral video is a teaser to the spot it'll air in the game.

Apple's video for its latest iPhone was the most-watched online video from a brand in the fourth quarter, a time period during which the consumer appetite for social video campaigns flourished. All told, Web users viewed online video content from brands more than 745 million times in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 25% from the quarter before, and up 35% from the year-ago period, according to the latest analysis of brand performance in social video advertising from social video analytics and ad platform Visible Measures.

What do you get when you combine a $500,000 online video buy with a $2.6 million TV campaign? A 14% percent boost in reach, an 18% jump in frequency and an 11% reduction in the cost of the impressions. Or so says YuMe, the online video network that partnered with Nielsen to study effectiveness of a cross-platform campaign. YuMe and Nielsen worked with one of media agency PHD's clients, known only as "major consumer health care brand," on the study that analyzed a Sept. 2011 marketing effort.

Five years ago, consumers were uploading six hours of video to YouTube every minute. Now, they're uploading ten times that amount -- 60 hours of video to YouTube every minute, or about an hour of video to YouTube every second, the site said on Monday. What's more, YouTube users around the world watch four billion videos every day, an increase of 25% in the last eight months. According to comScore's most recent figures, Google sites (which is primarily comprised of YouTube), lured 157.2 million unique viewers in the United States in December, watching nearly 22 billion videos that month.

Ever on the hunt for ROI in online video, a number of ad technology firms are currently testing and introducing new video formats already this year. In a just-released report, online ad technology company Pointroll has analyzed several video formats and claims that the top-performing online video ad categories for in-stream ads were consumer packaged goods, telecom and consumer electronics manufacturers, according to a study of impressions served from April to December 2011. Those categories had the highest completion rates. When looking at interactive in-stream ads, the best performing categories were automotive, entertainment and non-profit.

The number of video ads served by the top online video ad properties in the U.S. in December rose 20% compared to the same period a year ago. In December 2011, about 7.1 billion video ads were served across the biggest video ad properties, up from 5.9 billion for the same period a year ago, according to an analysis of comScore's most recent online video rankings. The frequency of ads delivered rose slightly to 46 ads per viewer in December 2011, for a 15% boost compared to a year ago.

I can still recall my shock at seeing a perverted Pokemon video appear in the YouTube search results way back when my son was a fan of Pokemon. It was in the earlier days of YouTube when what could be more fun to a young Pokemon fan than fan-made Pokemon videos? Alas, anyone who has searched for anything on YouTube knows that it's a searcher beware world. That's why I nodded my head knowingly when the news of a kid-friendly app from MeFeedia landed in my email this week. The video feed aggregator launched an app for iPads and Kindle …

While social media was merely a baby in the 2008 election, it's on track to come of age this political season and social video ads will likely play a big part. Witness the launch this week of Socialitical, a specialized social media services company for politicians, campaigns and lobbyists aiming to reach voters via Facebook and other social networks. Socialitical claims there are more than 4.5 million unique conversations happening each day on Facebook about politics and the company's tools are designed to target users who are most interested.