Google has added the ability to handle advertising on web video to its Adsense program. Adverts can consist either of another video but more likely a static video overlay, which has become a popular way of advertising on the internet.
Google is calling the service the AdSense for Video beta and it has been experimenting with the idea on YouTube for the past few months, and is now moving it onto its Adsense program, where anyone can sign up to be a partner site, and turn its traffic into advertising revenues. The adverts shown will be linked to the site or video content or both, using keywords.
The beta will work only in the US and only partners with sites that show 1 million videos a month including sites like Revver, Blip.tv and Brightcove. The aim is fine for advertisers in that they will be able to sign up to run single, timed video campaigns across the entire network.
We don’t think this is likely to make any difference to Google which still wins much of its advertising revenues out of search. It has recently begun offering video and images in search results, and this is being introduced gradually, and is more likely to have an effect on Google’s bottom line.
Rivals Yahoo and Microsoft have already introduced ideas of this type, but get ready for a huge wave of video advertising, either inserted video or overlays, because this is all facilitated by the new Adobe Media Player, coming out of beta now, which will make it possible for anyone to offer overlay video advertising on a network. Currently video advertising is less than 1% of all internet video advertising revenues, and nothing that anyone has done here has yet made a difference to this. Overlay ads are the great , white hope for this, rather than interruptive inserted pre-roll and post roll video adverts, which just get switched off.
AdSense for Video will offer advertisers and web partners a choice between running video or text ads and in the case of text ads they will carousel every 20 seconds.
Two weeks ago Yahoo bought Boston-based online video technology provider Maven Networks for around $150 million offering advertising and management tools around Adobe Flash video on the web, so its own similar program cannot be too far behind.