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Advertisers will spend $505 million on online video advertising in 2008, according to a downward-revised projection by eMarketer, which attributed the significant drop "to changes in methodology, based on historical data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), eMarketer's benchmark source," writes MarketingCharts.

Though the online-video ad spend projection is a severe decrease from the one eMarketer issued in February — which forecast a spend of $1.4 billion — the lower estimate still signifies an increase of 55.9 percent over 2007 spending levels.

Nevertheless, online-video ad spend is now forecast to surpass that previously estimated $1.4 billion two or so years later - sometime in 2011, by the end of which it is expected to reach $1.9 billion.

US online video ad spending is expected to grab only 2 percent of total internet ad spending - and 0.7 percent of TV ad spending - in 2008:

eMarketer also projects that nearly 67 percent of US internet users will view online video ads at least once a month in 2008; that's some 129.5 million people who are expected to watch online video ads in 2008.

A projected 183 million people in the US will watch online videos in 2013, just 4.9 percent more than in the prior year, eMarketer said:

Most videos consumed online today are clips rather full-length TV episodes or movies: The most popular online video content, watched by more than 40 percent of the US online video audience, consists of clips of 5 minutes or less - mostly news, jokes, movie trailers, music videos and TV shows.

"Even as video becomes the great growth area for internet advertising, there's a major disconnect between the amount of time people spend with short-form video, especially user-generated, and the ad dollars that accompany such video content," said eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman.

"However, as media companies change their business model, putting more and more professionally created video content online, the audience - and related ad dollars - will increase dramatically."