FreeWheel is on a roll, now serving almost 2 billion video ads/month, doubling its volumejust since November, 2009. In addition, the company has added MajorLeague Baseball Advanced Media to its customer roster and beganimplementing ads during the fall playoff season. The MLB win comes ontop of recently announcedcustomers Turner Broadcasting System and VEVO. FreeWheel'sco-CEO/co-founder Doug Knopper brought me up to speed on all the newslate last week.

Doug said that part of the increase in FreeWheel's volume isattributable to the additional customers that have come on board, buthe's also very excited about the year-over-year growth in ad volumeFreeWheel is seeingfor longer-term customers ("same store sales" if you will). FreeWheelis seeing big increases due to 3 factors: customers posting greaterquantities of video, plus deepening viewership of that video (all ofthis borne out by comScore's '09 video consumption data);customers' improving ability to actually sell ads against these videos(reflecting the shift of budgets to the online video medium); andreduced friction through the emergence of "accepted practices" in adoperations.

FreeWheel is also benefiting from its specialization in helpingcontent providers monetize their video on third-party sites (e.g.YouTube, AOL, MSN, Fancast, etc.). More and more content executives arerealizing that sizable viewership opportunities exist by syndicatingtheir video outside of their own properties. Doug said that everycontent company FreeWheel is now talking to is interested in some kindof syndication.

Doug described 3 types of syndication he's seeing: (1) across afamily of sister corporate sites, such as PGA.com providing CNN.comvideo, which are both owned by Turner; (2) between affiliated entitieslike local MLB teams providing video to the main MLB.com hub and (3)externally, to unaffiliated 3rd parties, such as WMG music providingvideos to YouTube. Given all this syndication activity, I wasinterested to learn from Doug what percentage of the ads FreeWheelserves fall into each of these 3 buckets vs. what percentage are servedon the customer's sites themselves. Doug said that FreeWheel is pullingthose numbers together in a way that ensures its customers privacy andwill get back to me when he has them.

In addition to the above syndication activity, FreeWheel is seeingexperimentation with delivering ads to mobile devices, convergence/CEplayers and Internet-enabled TVs. In all these cases, customized adpolicies determine who sells what ad inventory and how revenue isshared and reported. Powering all of this has been part of FreeWheel'score mission from inception, making it a key player in what I've calledthe 'syndicated video economy."

FreeWheel's growth echoes what I've been hearing lately from bothvideo ad network executives and video content providers. They too aretalking about rapidly rising volumes and improving monetization. As I wroterecently, I've been impressed lately by efforts to make video ads moreengaging and provide a better ROI, a trend I see continuing. Takentogether, while it's still relatively early days, online videoadvertising seems to be making great strides.