The chart below shows the growth of Online Video Advertising across all industries in the US. We believe that the lodging industry will see a significant adoption of the online video advertising because most consumers want to see, touch, and feel the hotel before booking their lodging online. As search engines move towards Universal Search and start showing results from online videos, it is more critical for hotels to have online searchable videos – the key being “searchable.”

The Online Video developed for Search Engines is vastly different from the standard videos that you can get from companies specializing in video creation. It’s the same parallel as a search engine friendly website vs. a website that is set up as a brochure. Search engine friendly websites can be found for different key words from the search engines; however, to view a brochure style website, you have to know the website address to get to that site. The search engine optimized video and standard videos differ from each other in the same way. A search optimized video can be found by users typing things relevant to your market on main search engines and in video search engines; to find your standard videos, the consumer needs to know the website address for the site where that video is posted.

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AOL’s Mobile Search has a new – really cool – Surf the Web feature that makes it easier to view web pages through a mobile device, such as your cell phone or PDA. Surf the Web is designed to intelligently resize and reformat web pages for easy viewing on a small screen. See how it looks at: http://mobile.aolsearch.com/. You do not need your actual phone to view it.