[Posted by Nate Elliott]

I've spent a lot of time this year researching online video contests (clients can read my report on Best Practices for User-Generated Video Contests and my Video Contest Checklist, while non-clients can get the highlights in this blog post), and I'm happy that I'm still getting questions from our clients every week about how they can run better contests themselves. So to help our clients (and the industry) keep track of what's working well in the space, I've been compiling a list of the best online video contests I've seen.

I just updated that list, and in doing so I noticed two emerging trends in online video contests:

1. Alcoholic beverage brands love the control video contests offer. More than half the contests in my 'food and beverage' category are from alcohol brands: Jim Beam, Okanagan Spring, Black Box Wines, and Little Penguin Wine. And that makes sense, because contests offer brands the opportunity to drive user-generated content, but still remain in control of that content. All they have to do is run each video past their legal team before approving it to be posted on the contest website. (Or, if they want videos to be posted automatically, they still have the ability to pull down questionable content after it's been submitted.) This type of control has made contests popular with marketers in other sensitive or regulated industries, too -- like financial services and health care.
2. B2B marketers are warming up to the power of video contests. We're still not seeing B2B contests by the thousands -- but more B2B marketers are using contests now than six months ago. Two of my favorite recent B2B contests are Google's TV For All Contest, in which they're giving away free TV ads; and TCBY's This Could Be Yours Store Givewaway, in which they're giving away a free TCBY franchise.

Go check out the complete list of my favorite online video contests -- and if you've got one you'd like to add, leave a comment on that page or below.