Advertisers welcome FT's video initiative

Hong Kong - The Financial Times has launched the FT mini player, a video player embedded in news and feature articles, that gives advertisers the opportunity to gain access to a larger audience and allows campaigns to be more relevant to the context of the messages.

Over the past six months, the FT has seen a significant increase in interest from advertisers and high profile partnerships with clients such as IBM, Bulgari, DHL and Vestas.

The FT mini player gives users easier access to high quality video content by integrating the video into articles, instead of getting users to open a new window to access a separate player.

FT.com currently delivers over one million video views a month and publishes over 150 videos online.

According to a report from Jupiter Research Online Video in Europe, the growth of online video has helped video consumption evolve from a niche online activity into one with critical mass.

"In the context of overall online consumption, video remains a fraction of time spent, but growth is fuelled by the proliferation of video content overall, not only through specialist video sites such as YouTube, but as newspaper sites and ISP portals increasingly integrate video content into their offerings," the report noted.

Rob Grimshaw, MD for FT.com, said the newspaper company continues to innovate and look for new ways to integrate and showcase all of its multimedia content online and "the FT Mini player is another step forward in terms of offering users easier access to our best video content".

"We are sure that the player will prove popular to both users and advertisers, increasing the site's video audience and the amount of time spent on the site by each visitor," Grimshaw added.