Bangalore: News websites are using advertising videos more effectively to attract users. These video pop-ups often urge the readers to play the video before they read. CNN.com and ESPN.com have been using this method along with Wall Street Journal, which has moved its video player front and center with a twice-a-day live newscast on WSJ.com, according to The New York Times.

At a time when other categories of advertising dollars are shrinking, video ads are growing. News sites are adding more video inventory to keep pace with the demands of advertisers. "Every watershed event leaves video more popular than before," said Charles W. Tillinghast, the President of MSNBC.com, a joint venture between NBC Universal and Microsoft.

The New York Times, Gannett and Tribune, each reach more than a million viewers a month with video streams, according to comScore. Sometimes the Times homepage streams live videos of events. K. C. Estenson, the General Manager of CNN.com, a unit of Time Warner, said that "People are using the Internet in a different way now." He added, "With broadband penetration becoming ubiquitous and more and more sites having this easy capability, people are expecting video to be there."

Beyond news sites, video is now the fastest-growing segment of the Internet advertising market. Digital video amounted to $477 million in revenue in the first half of 2009, up 38 percent from the same time period in 2008, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. With an estimated $5 billion in revenue in the first half of 2009, search remains the dominant segment of online advertising, but it is expected to grow only marginally this year.

Analysts say they expect the flow of online advertising dollars to video to continue. The research firm eMarketer projects 35 to 45 percent growth for the segment for each of the next five years, topping out at $5.2 billion in 2014. eMarketer said in the five-year outlook it released last month, that video ads would be the "main channel" for major advertisers seeking to increase their online spending. Already, ads for companies like Johnson & Johnson and Unilever pop up often on sites like MSNBC.com. "More and more advertisers are starting to play in the online video space," said Jeremy Steinberg, the Vice President of Digital Sales and Business Development for the Fox News Channel.

Web executives say some clients think of online video as an extension of TV, and others think of it as an enhancement that allows for interactive messages and instant feedback from viewers. They acknowledge that the medium is still in many ways immature. Sites continue to disagree about the legitimacy of "autoplay," a setting that starts videos automatically when a Web page loads, increasing the number of streams without necessarily knowing that the Web user is watching.

"The Web is fulfilling this promise of being a medium where you can enjoy video as much as you can see it on TV," said Tillinghast. "The difference online is, if you want to do something with it - share it, stick it on a blog, post it on a Facebook page, or mark it and save it - you can do all that. And that was never possible before."