I am calling this prediction "Cam's Law" (after Moi) with due respect and deep regard to Intel Founder Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years thereby exponentially increasing computing power.

Trust me, it does not take a genius to see the trends. My prediction is firmly guided by data. comScore recently reported that Americans watched 11.3 billion video ads in December, setting a new peak, and a sharp 10% rise from November’s 10.3 billion. December 2012 ad views were twice as many as in January 2012, representing 59% year-over-year growth. Video ads accounted for 22.6% of all videos viewed in December, and 1.9% of time spent viewing video online.

But That Was Last Year

Now three months into 2013, I feel ever more confident about Cam’s Law given the astronomical speed at which video advertising has grown in popularity. All signs point to the death of banner and static ads. Here's why:

1. Consumers love video; not just cat MEMEs, but original content. And they watch a lot of video online. Nielsen says Americans spent more than 360 billion minutes online in December 2012 and streamed 24.6 billion videos.
2. Consumers watch video ads. After 60 years of television we have learned to watch the ads to get to the content. Yes, we know you want to get to your show, but often the ads are entertaining, visual and mercifully brief – and getting more interactive by the day.
3. Advertisers like video ads because consumers watch them. From August this year, market research company Nielsen will validate the astronomical shift to online video by including video viewed on tablet and mobile devices in their ratings measures. This will provide advertisers the data they need to shift their spend to online video in even greater numbers.
4. Consumers are buying (lots of) tablets. The global market for tablet computers surged 78.4 percent last year, according to research firm IDC, and sales are on schedule to pass PCs by 2017.
5. Tablets & smart phones make watching video easy in the bedroom, train, couch, park bench, and, ahem, bathroom.
6. Tablets make shopping easy and you can bet your last dollar that online retailers took notice last Thanksgiving and Christmas, so expect a monumental change in online sales strategies this year and increased consumer purchases via mobile and tablet.
7. If consumers are buying on their tablets, guess where advertisers will want to run their ads?
8. 4G will make watching video anywhere seamless. Did someone say “conversation killer?”
9. Banner ads do not work, but you already knew that.

Advertisers Can’t Ignore The Numbers

As advertisers are beginning to embrace tablet advertising, in virtually every case they want video in their ad units. Consumers are watching those video ads hundreds of times more than they are clicking on banner ads.

While display and banner advertising were yesterday’s stepping stones for advertisers to enter the digital market, video is where the real action is.

Watch this space.

In 2014, we will review Cam's Law to see where the market is; and we'll do it via video because we know you will watch that. On your tablet.

Cameron Yuill is the Founder and CEO of AdGent Digital, the company behind AdTouch™, a patent-pending HTML5 tablet ad platform for the creation, management and analysis of ad units on tablets for the mobile web

Modernity, however, is a fickle mistress, and as times change so do user preferences. With the rise of tablets, smartphones, and streaming media, television consumption has gone rogue. And so, Nielsen, the staunch overseer of ratings, has had to hop-skip from the staid television set to a whole new array of hardware, recording the behavior of viewers who prefer streaming video through on-demand services such as Hulu.

The reason, of course, has been the increasing popularity of the tablet. NPD DisplaySearch projects the number of tablets to grow from 374 million units in 2012 to 809 million in about five years with Apple’s iPad, even in the wake of recent slips, still holding on to a 48 percent market share. With this boost in tablet sales there has been a corresponding rise in online ad spending. Not only that, but users’ viewing habits are influencing the kind of advertising we’re seeing.

This has led to an increase in ads with interactivity and video. According to recent data, between 2009 and 2014, online video ad spending is estimated to swell from $1.97 billion to $5.71 billion. Forrester Research released a report in October, 2012 known as “The Digital Media Forecast 2012 – 2017,” which predicts that video ads will be the fastest growing sector of advertising, growing by an average of 26 percent a year until 2017. By 2014, Forrester forecasts that at least 40 percent of the online display ad market will take on the video format, effectively eliminating the static banner ads and archaic click through rate attempts of old.

Thus far, these video ads seem to be more effective. According to a 2012 report from leading ad management and distribution platform, DG , and its online campaign management solution, MediaMind, the click-through rates (CTR) for interactive online video is about 27.4 times that of standard banner ads and almost 12 times that of rich media advertisements. Furthermore, according to the study, people globally are 10 percent more likely to watch an interactive video ad to completion than a rich media ad that simply contains video within it.

Nielsen’s part in this unfolding drama is to provide accurate measurement tools. While there is plenty of competition in measurement in the digital space, such as Comscore, Google, and Quantcast to name a few, Nielsen has an incredible advantage in the video streaming space for one very good reason. It is the measurement tool in television. As the bulk of ad dollars are spent on TV the buyers will look to Neilsen as they begin to test spending on video streaming. Buyers will want one solution that tells them how their ad performed across TV, tablet and mobile. It is an incredible advantage as dollars shift from TV to tablet.

The streaming media game will finally give the powers that be a transparent look into the behaviors of users gobbling up content on their own time; free from the clutches of scheduling and cable programming. The result: a new channel of revenue and exposure for brands and advertisers looking to allocate their spending habits in a previously untapped market.

While it may have been fashionably late to the game, Nielsen might just be the scrappy sidekick that helps the tablet achieve the advertising dominance within its grasp.

So, let me say ‘thank you’ to CBS on behalf of the millions (I am betting that there were millions) of consumers who took advantage of the live stream. It certainly provided consumers the flexibility and choice we deserve when it comes to watching the biggest sporting event in the country.

Now, if you were only watching the big game on your tablet that would be fine. You would be very, very happy.

However, I made the mistake of having the television on at the same time as having the live stream on my iPad on my lap (I am sure many others did this as well).

The issue - and I don’t know if it was my connection or the WiFi I was on or if it is a technical limitation of live stream - but the stream to the tablet lagged the television coverage. It was not a short lag, it was considerable. At one stage in the first quarter, I got out the stop watch and timed it. The lag was 21.7 seconds. This was essentially streaming one play behind the live coverage on the television.

This made it impossible to have both the tablet and television on at the same time. And you guessed it, the big screen eventually won.

That said, I did like the fact that you had access to a curated Twitter feed and the commercials that you could play on demand on the tablet.

Perhaps the most exciting innovation was the ability to switch between camera angles at will. It certainly made me feel like I was in control of what I wanted to watch. There was a second or so between the camera angles switching but nothing that marred the experience.

At the risk of looking stupid, the only other thing that I had an issue with was that I could not watch the game on the full screen. Try as I might, I could not find a way of expanding the picture to the full screen. It might be able to be done, but for the life of me I could not figure it out. I am sure someone from CBS will call me out on this.

Overall, I must say I was excited to watch the game on my tablet. We should be able to watch everything on live on tablet. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of live sporting events that are not available. At least there is one network that gets it. Congratulations CBS. Great game!

Apple’s innovation opened the floodgates for publishing companies to crash the mobile party by using Apple’s new device to showcase their beautiful print publications the way they were intended to be seen. Apple capitalized by setting up an easy-to-use pay wall for publishers to upload their content.

Enter the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an organization that monitors circulation and customer base information for magazines and newspapers in North America, which declared that “rate base” would once again be the foundation for setting online advertising rates.

A Match Made in Heaven – Or So It Was Thought

It was beginning to feel like the good old days were coming back. Finally, publishers could stop giving away content for free and start making money again. Certainly they were not going to make that same mistake they had made on the Web.

Immediately, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp., shelled out $30 million to launch The Daily – an iPad only newspaper for a$39.99 yearly subscription. Most big name publishers followed suit and began building app versions of their own print publications.

Trouble began to brew, however, as Apple essentially threw a wrench in the plans of companies looking to strike gold by taking advantage of an untapped stream of user engagement and revenue. The tech titan demanded a 30% cut of the revenue for all single-copy sales via the iTunes store. Nevertheless, efforts pressed on and app development was in hot pursuit, but unfortunately the problems persisted.

The notion of the ideal synergy between mobile and publishing was never meant to last. Mobile platforms differ in size and users handle their devices upright or sideways, allowing for a “portrait” and a “landscape” view. Consequently, publishers had to come up with 6 versions of a single editorial product just to account for these diverse variables. Coding conflicts ensued.

Big Trouble in Little App World

Objective-C, the native iOS coding language was unheard of in most publishing web development departments at the time. As the realization that the in-house talent to tackle this obstacle was practically nonexistent, publishing companies began to outsource their app development. In time, they found this process was extremely time-consuming and radically pricey.

No worries. Most publishers continued building.

This persistence was met with yet another brick wall. With apps, when you want to read something offline, you download the file first. Magazine app files were hundreds of megabytes in size. Downloads took hours, but oh well. If consumers wanted all the app interactivity they were promised, they would just have to suffer through the time it took to download the content.

Looking back now, we can examine the results of the millions of dollars spent on apps by news and magazine publishers.

As of 4th quarter 2011,Wired Magazine had secured a print circulation of 812,434. The flip side of the coin, revealed only 33,237 digital subscriptions of the Wired app, which accounted for only 4.1% of the total circulation. This was in spite of the fact that it was widely regarded as one of the best apps in the marketplace for accessing the magazine’s published content – especially in terms of user interface and functionality.

For the New Yorker, out of the nearly one million magazine subscriptions the outlet boasted, they consequently managed to secure a mere 26,880 digital subscribers for the mobile version of their publication.

Finally, NewsCorp announced at the end of 2012 that it was closing down The Daily – its iPad-only app – after only 40,000 paying customers showed up and shelled out.

For newspaper and magazine publishers the cost of developing apps has far outweighed the ROI. Yet many (read: most) publishers still push consumers to download their app. Why? One can only guess it is because they built them. However, what many publishers intoxicated by the app boom failed to realize was that there always was, and still is, a viable alternative to native app fever.

The Dawn of a New Alternative

The Financial Times is a prime example. The outlet decided to take a different path by creating a website in HTML5, an all new programming markup language that showcased superior capabilities for rendering content in ways that made it simpler to browse and more interactive for the user experience.

While there weren’t as many features as a native app, the HTML5 solution avoided the pitfalls of apps- it bypassed Apple's 30% tax, eliminated lengthy download times, and published once so that it works on every device and, as a bonus, the content was crawlable and searchable.

The time has finally come for content publishers to give up on their apps.