Those who have a keen eye on advertising trends are sure to tell you that ad spending increases dramatically every year. It’s true, every time you think ad spending can’t possibly increase, the budget for the same starts bursting at its seams. And why shouldn’t it? Advertisers are actively receiving the kind of responses that they’re hoping for and meeting their revenue targets with online ad campaigns. Video advertising is among the most popular forms of display marketing these days.

Not only are video ads versatile and engaging, but they’re also not nearly as difficult to create as most people think they are. The best minds in the advertising business have proven their prowess and expertise in creating great video ads time and time again. However, it’s not all rosy here, this form of marketing can bring a different set of challenges. The foremost of these challenges is ad placement. It doesn’t matter if you have the best designers and content creators on hand if you feature your ads in the wrong places.

Reliable statistics have indicated that video ads are on track to attain higher growth rates than other forms of Display Advertising next year. The spending on these ads across all popular platforms is predicted to reach a whopping $11 billion!  This is likely to bring the total budget for video ads to $200 billion or more. YouTube ads alone are predicted to take up 8.5% of this figure. In other words, YouTube is currently the largest social media platform to feature these ads after Facebook.

Now, you may be wondering, if Facebook takes up a bigger chunk of video ad spending, why have we decided to talk about YouTube ad placements here? The biggest reason is competition. Think about it, if the ad spending on Facebook is more than it is on YouTube, it means that more advertisers are choosing to feature their ads on the former. Sure, billions of users will see your ads on Facebook, but how many would be willing to engage with them? If your ads don’t consistently meet the high standards that other popular ads on the platform have established, then chances are, not many.

Another way to look at this would be that you’d have to spend more money (and effort) on creating ads for Facebook than you would on other platforms. Not only would this be exhausting, but it also could negatively impact the morale of your marketing department or advertising experts when these ads don’t perform well. Considering video ads arguably require more creativity than static ads do, the morale of those that create your ads is of paramount importance here.

Besides, Facebook ads can be relatively costlier as well. In comparison, YouTube only charges you if a user waits to view your ad in its entirety. Also, many advertisers prefer YouTube because of the different kinds of ads that you can feature on it. Your ads can be either skippable or unskippable, mid-video, at the start of the video, or at the end of the video. In this way, YouTube gives you the freedom to decide how you’d like to design your ads and where you’d like to place them in any given video. With such flexible options on the table, it’s easy to see why advertisers often prefer this platform over Instagram and other social media giants.

What’s more, YouTube garners an incredible amount of traffic. Remember when PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ was the first video to cross 1 billion views on the site and it was a huge deal? Yeah, now ‘Baby Shark’ has over 9 billion views and it’s only been 9 years since ‘Gangnam Style’ came out! This astounding growth in viewership is like music to an advertiser’s ears (yes, since we talked about songs above we couldn’t resist adding that here).

Another great advantage of placing your video ads on YouTube is that they’re sure to be well-targeted. A user’s search history on Google and past web activity influence which ads they come across on the platform. Therefore, any given user who views your ad on YouTube is sure to be more interested in your company or product than, say, a random user would be. In this way, you’re likely to receive greater positive engagement from viewers on the site and quicker than you’d have expected.

Additionally, video ads are expected to be more mobile-friendly next year. Therefore, it makes sense that an increasing number of users would find your ads more accessible and easy to interact with. Bearing in mind that people now spend more time on their mobile devices than they ever did before, this can only mean great things for advertisers that rely on such ads to boost sales. Next year, about 3/4th of all ad spending is expected to be on video ads.

In this scenario, you can see why the popularity of these ads isn’t showing the slightest sign of waning. After all, we have television to thank for that since it allowed people to grow accustomed to (even fondly cherish) viewing some truly memorable video ads. Since YouTube is a platform that only features videos, to begin with, it logically follows that its users would be more amenable to sitting through video ads than they would be if they came across such ads on other sites.

All said and done, video ads are here to stay and if you’re one of the many companies that would like to wield this powerful tool to increase sales, we’d say YouTube placements may well lead to success.