So it turns out that when it comes to Super Bowl ads, all of us are like a bunch of children with Christmas presents — we just don’t want to wait.

When it comes to active viewer engagement, YouTube is just a much bigger venue than the Super Bowl for the video advertisements.

According to YouTube, showing an ad online before the Super Bowl floods that ad with conscious eyeballs BIG TIME. Try 600% more eyeballs. Studies generated over the last couple of years have shown that, on average, ads that ran before the Super Bowl last year achieved 9 million views while those that waited only racked up 1.3 million views.

In 2011, only a dozen advertising companies broadcast their ads online before the big game, but one of those that did, Volkwagen’s “The Force” (the cute little Darth Vader kid) became the most-shared ad of all time, largely because of this here internet (the black-market VHS trade accounted for surprisingly little

of those views). In 2012, 34 of the 54 ads that ran during the Super Bowl were broadcast beforehand. This year, on Monday alone, Audi, Axe, Cen

tury 21 and Volkwagen all have posted their ads online to start drumming up the anticipation, and more will follow in the coming days.

The bottom line is that when it comes to active viewer engagement, YouTube is just a much bigger venue than the Super Bowl — while last year’s Super Bowl (the m

ost watched American broadcast in history) attracted 111 million eyes (hmm, probably should say 111 million pairs of eyes, but don’t want to be biased against cyclops’), those same ads, collectively, have been viewed on YouTube over 300 million times. Advantage: Internet. Suck it, television.

via Super Bowl Ads Generate 600% More Views Online According to YouTube: Suck It, Television.