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Online Annual Reports or Electronic Annual Reports are becoming very popular among companies and investors. According to Computershare (2008a), a leading financial market services and technology provider for the global securities industry, companies are distributing electronic copies of their Annual Reports to their shareholders to achieve several objectives including timeliness of reporting, printing cost savings, the ability to search within electronic copies and saving the environment to some extent. When it comes to cost savings, Hewlett Packard saved USD 300,000 the first year it allowed employee shareholders to elect to receive the statements electronically (Kuperman, 2000). According to Computershare (2008b), more than 80% of its survey respondents have elected to receive e-Annual Reports.

Regulators can play a significant role in driving more companies to publish their Annual Reports online. The United Kingdom Government has already issued an Act, UK Companies Act 2006, that require all listed companies to provide their annual reports on their websites (Office of Public Sector Information, 2006). The Securities & Exchange Commission (2008) in USA had issued similar rules requiring all companies to file electronic copies of their annual reports.

Some companies took a further step on the tools used above. They started publishing online Video Annual Reports (VAR). They argue these reports help shareholders get a better feel about the company and they argue these reports will replace the printed annual reports in the coming three to five years because of the cost savings and the corporate branding opportunities they carry. However, some opponents to this phenomenon argue that recent surveys suggest that the majority of shareholders still prefer printed reports (Lowengard, 2008).

In the same line, few US-Based companies including Pike Electric, California Pizza Chicken and Ruth’s Chris Steak House started using the free YouTube.com service to publish their Annual Video Reports (Snider, 2008a).