Truveo Index Hits 100 Million Videos

AOL-owned video search engine Truveo announced yesterday that its video index had reached 100 million videos and predicted that number would climb to a billion by 2009. The company also said that its search index grew in 2007 from a base of just five million videos at relaunch in August, 2007. Truveo has also been aggressively pushing out internationally.

Video is clearly one of the consumer battlegrounds and premium categories for marketers as branding dollars move increasingly online. However, monetizing online video is still far from a clear proposition. Consumers generally don’t respond well to pre-roll ads, and advertisers are, at this stage, ambivalent about the more experimental “overlays” that are being tried by Google/YouTube and AOL.

As users watch increasing amounts of video content online, it’s starting to become more clear that producers and publishers will not be able to monetize that user behavior and content at levels or rates equivalent to traditional TV.