Google Launches AdSense Video Units

Posted on October 9, 2007

The New York Times reports on Google's clever plans to turn its very popular YouTube video sharing service into a video syndication service.

The Internet search giant is expected to introduce a service on Tuesday to allow Web sites in its ad network to embed relevant videos from some YouTube content creators. A Web site or blog specializing in hiking, for instance, might choose to embed hiking videos from YouTube.
The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google's network, known as AdSense. Since the videos will be surrounded by ads, the service is another way for Google to cash in on the huge number of video clips stored on YouTube.
Several other networks distribute videos and ads on the Web, but none reach as many Web sites as AdSense.
Google said it would share revenue from the ads with the creators of the videos and with the Web sites that embed them, though it declined to specify what percentage of the revenue will be kept by each party.

If the television networks aren't going to turn website into syndication channels Google will it seems. For now these are generally just very short video clips but in the future full television shows could be syndicated in a similar manner.

Google has an introductory post about the new video units here. There is also a faq. The faq says the ads in the video units will be both pay-per-click and CPM based. It says reporting will be different for these ads than other AdSense ads. Website owners can select video content by selecting specific categories or by choosing a specific provider.

This will be a big deal for video publishers. Google says AdSense publishers can select specific providers so video publishers will be trying to get AdSense users to syndicate their videos. NewTeeVee has a short list of who some of the early video content providers are. Read/WriteWeb says Google is expected to expand the number of video providers -- currently only a few YouTube user channels are being syndicated.

Ads have been run along side a very select few user channels on the YouTube site for a handful of months but these reports indicate that the program will be made much wider and be taken off of the site all around the web.

Here is an explanatory video from Google about their video units.