Google is bringing video to AdSense, and they’re doing it right now. Though there were sightings of the new contextual video ads, real buzz didn’t develop until the New York Times confirmed Dow Jones, Conde Nast and Sony BMG were in on it.
Google Syndicating Video Through AdSense
The Times reported that Google was working with those companies to syndicate their videos on other websites. The videos are sponsored and Google splits the ad revenue with both the website that runs the video, and the producers of it.
We’ll use Adversus.com as an example because it’s a lot more fun than the StreetInsider.com running Pantene sponsored Wall Street Journal videos – aren’t those publications rivals though? If you look to the bottom of this Adversus model page (see, I said it was a lot more fun), you’ll see a video box “powered by Google.”
In that box, is a short tutorial, one of 22 tutorials it appears, from Epicurious.com about how to use knives. Above the box is a text link to Epicurious.com. In this example, it seems Epicurious.com is both the advertiser as well as the content producer. It’s not clear though, what knives have to do with advertising models – but who really cares?
What matters is that this is next step to TV-ifying, for lack of a better word, the Internet. The NYT article alludes that this is a real compromise from video content producers, who traditionally have absorbed all ad revenue generated by their content. Though the producers would rather have all that audience to themselves, they realize that traffic to there site largely depends on Google.
Kim Malone, director of online sales for Google AdSense, said the new program offered producers and advertisers “literally millions of channels on the Internet.” Economy of scale, then, where millions of funnels collect pennies from heaven, is enough to change the tradition of video advertising.
For anyone doubting Google moves in the past year, like buying YouTube, the new model serves as an expansion of an already blisteringly successful model.
“So what if Google/YouTube can’t come to agreement on distributing media companies’ content onto YouTube,” writes Rafat Ali, “the other way around (the core of its business) is working just fine, thank you.”
One of the earliest sightings of the change comes from the Google Operating System blog, where the author has a few questions about the new ad model:
* What are the videos sites? How to detect all of them and find the embeddable code?
* Will those sites want the Plus Box? Maybe they’ll say Google steals traffic from them, because they want to show ads and to have big page views.
* Who will click on the search result to see the video (and maybe some comments and context), like they used to do?
* It will be the first time when content outside of Google control will be included in the search results (for example, the thumbnails from image search results are hosted by Google). Will there be performance issues?
Add to 
Bookmark Murdok:
