The Unstoppable Rise of the Online Marketing Video [INFOGRAPHIC]

Times have changed since the first business video was introduced by AT&T in 1970.

These days, a majority of marketing budgets are dedicated to video production as YouTube continues to gain traction on the web. Online video has gone from being an afterthought to rising to the foreground in marketing campaigns.

In the six years since YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, video viewing on the web has dramatically increased, according to Business 2 Community’s Ryan W. Neal.

“Thanks to over 180 million Americans watching over 33 billion videos on the Internet in the month of June alone, an all-time record high of 11 billion videos ads were seen,” he writes.

An infographic by KZO Innovations shows the timeline of business videos.

This year, YouTube announced that it is dedicating $350 million to creating its own content on site. Even Hulu and Netflix have jumped on board, introducing original programming themselves.

With third-party content providers now becoming content creators, it looks like 2012 will be the year that video took over. And, for marketers in general, the use of and emphasis on online video will only continue to grow. Ad budgets this year for videos are predicted to increase by 23 percent.

“Nearly three-quarters (73%) of brands and ad professionals cite brand building as their main objective with online video marketing, up from the 68% who said so a year earlier,” according to Marketing Profs and Adap.TV/Digiday.