One of the problems with the huge online video opportunity is that premium video ads can typically only be placed in premium video content, which advertisers grumble is not in great enough supply.

So The Economist is now beginning to thread auto-playing video advertising in between paragraphs of its respected text articles.

The development comes from French firm TeadsinRead ad format. It sees video ads start as readers scroll them in to view and stop as they continue scrolling on, like so…

At DMEXCO in October, Teads’ business development head Pierre de Grandmaison told Beet.TV: “We’ve integrated our formats where (publishers) get around 50 million completed video views a month without creating any new video content.”