Google testing online video ads
Cory Bergman December 28th, 2006
Earlier this year, Google rolled out click-to-play video ad units as part of its AdWords network (demo here). Now Google is testing in-stream video ads, a sort of video AdSense for content publishers. Here’s how it would work: Publishers upload video to Google Video, embed the players on their own sites and the Google-powered ads are embedded in the streams (currently as post-rolls). The revenue is then split. Google has been testing the in-stream ads on Beet.TV (although I didn’t see them when I checked today) and also working with MTV. Add YouTube to this equation and you have a massive network of video blogs that are shooting, posting and embedding video content, a market ripe for video advertising.
3 Comments Add your own
1. discreet_chaos | December 28th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
It’s been more than a week, but probably a couple of months ago, Google quietly slipped a couple of ads midstream of some longer clips.
A while back, I started watching many of the interviews for the “Archive of American Television” on Google Video. Most of these interviews are divided into multiple 20-odd minute segments. For example, Betty White and Jonathon Winters are five segment interviews, while Ted Turner is eight and Norman Lear talks for ten.
After I had worked my way through several, I initially thought about putting together a clickable list for a blogpost, but before I decided that was too much work, I went back to get the addresses for some that I had already watched.
Because of the autoplay, I was quite surprised when an ad had been added to Betty White’s interview around the five minute mark and again at around the twenty of each segment. Then, perhaps as quickly as the ads appeared, they disappeared, but in their wake remains little blue boxes on the slider which mouseover to say “Advertisement”.
Though and I just checked, there is no ad there now, but they’ve also been adding the boxes to many of the other interviews which I know didn’t have them before, so they may just be waiting for one big rollout with one big advertiser.
I don’t know, but I’ve coded the url under my name to point toward Ms White’s first segment for a quick example and because the interviews may also be of interest for reasons other than the ad-prep; When I did finally run a post alerting my readers to this trove of terrific information, an anonymous commenter pointed toward an undocumented official blog which lists all of the interviews in a sidebar.
This official TOC is at tvinterviewsarchive [dot] blogspot [dot] com
2. discreet_chaos | December 28th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
PS) I now see they’ve recoded the link from the individual video’s sidebars to point toward an “interview” section of the Emmy site, while whenever I first discovered these videos, I’m pretty sure it just pointed toward the homepage because I couldn’t find a list.
So, now there is a list available within another click of the Emmy link, but the videos online are only marked with a “G” and they’re hard to pick out. Elsewhere within that section, they do also point toward the blogspot site and there, not only do they only list the online videos in the sidebar, but in the case of Peter Boyle whose video hasn’t migrated to Google, they quoted from it for his recent death.
3. Sam | January 18th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Wow, thanks for the excellent information!
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