It’s a great day to be Google and own YouTube, as new figures indicate video consumption trends continue to skyrocket. ComScore says we watched 28 billion web videos in February–and YouTube.com captured more than 99% of those eyeballs.

Between 2006 when YouTube was voted TIME Magazine person of the year, and 2008 when The New York Times suggested that videosnacking was all the rage, mainstream video consumption hit the tipping point and went mainstream. Of course this trend had everything to do with explosive rates of expansion and adoption of broadband and wi-fi networks during that period.

So we like to watch, but what’s keeping our attention? Which videos have the longest legs? A peek a AdAge weekly viral video roundup shows that many (and often, most) of the top picks are advertisements. The same content that television viewers will pause, skip, or ignore—we turn around and consume on-demand, post on our social network profiles, share with our friends, as premium online creative. Ironic?

Not really. It’s always been so with the Super Bowl and the Oscars big-budget commercials. And partly because of the virality and WOM/WOW buzz connected to event broadcast spots, we know that today, advertising is content, and content is advertising. Which is why content marketing and digital asset optimization is all the rage.

Luckily for the amateur videographers among us, there is a tonne of information about where to start with buying a camcorder, deciding what to videorecord, and producing/distributing web video content online in such a way that it is optimized for sharing and search.

Thanks Jeff Bullas (@jeffbullas) for sharing the link to the content marketing blog via Google Reader.