For CBC.ca‘s pre-roll video ads, there is a single sponsor per clip with video ads of 15 seconds or less preceding the programming. In addition to news, brands can link up with The Hour, Fashion File, and popular comedies This Hour Has 22 Minutes and The Rick Mercer Report. These programs are already getting lots of play online – with Mercer, for example, chalking up more than 400,000 hits last month.

The introduction of video ads follows a revamping of CBC.ca, which launched mid-November. Bob Kerr, director of business and platform development for CBC English television, says along with making more content available, the revamp involved improving the user experience, establishing a system to refresh content several times a day, as well as the new evaluation tools on the back end to measure how many people are visiting the site, and data transfers to see who is actually playing a given video.

‘The numbers we’re getting seem to bear out that there is an appetite for video online,’ says Kerr. ‘I know it’s been talked about for years but until the last year or so, with Google and YouTube and all the attention video is getting now, we’re really getting some good numbers. Now that we’ve moved it to the forefront, giving it visibility, I think we’re going to double our existing numbers very quickly, likely in the first month of operation.’

A demographic study of CBC.ca visitors versus its key competitors, conducted for CBC in September, indicates that Internet use in Canada spans age groups, gender and geography. CBC.ca, Canada.com and CNN.com share very similar age profiles, with 47% of their unique visitors under 35, while 68% of GlobeandMail.com‘s unique visitors are over 35 and 27% are over 55. Visitors to Canadian sites (TSN.ca excepted) are pretty evenly split between males and females.

AOL Canada is the sales rep for CBC.ca, handling both pre-roll video advertising and audio podcast sponsorships: cbc.ca/advertise.