November 20, 2007...5:38 pm
AdSense Video Comes to the UK
Google extended their online advertising platform last month, on 9 October, to include the use of video. At first this offering was only available in the USA, but today it has been rolled out to several other predominantly English speaking countries. Now website publishers in the UK, Ireland and Canada can benefit from Google’s new video based advertising service as well.
If you live in one of these countries and have an AdSense account you should see the options for video ads added to your account over the next few days.
How Do You Make Money From AdSense Video?
Google call a video that you place on your website via AdSense, a “video unit”. This is because you aren’t just placing a particular video on your website as you would when placing something found on YouTube. The video unit is placed on your site and can be set to do any of the following:
- display one particular video
- display any videos created by a particular publisher
- display videos from a particular category
- display any video based on an assessment of your page content by Google.
It’s important to realise that the video itself is not the advertisement. The video player contains advertising.
The video unit works much in the same way as the YouTube video player so your site readers should be familiar which this player. The main difference with the standard YouTube player is that above the video there is a fairly traditional banner ad and the bottom 20% of the video has a transparent text overlay which also displays rotating text ads.
Apparently there are 2 income models. Google say that,
“Ads on video units can be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impression basis.”
It’ll be interesting to see how the numbers stack up for each payment option and when it becomes more beneficial to swap from one model to another.
Which Video Unit Option To Use?
This is the most interesting part of the equation and it throws up a lot of questions. Should you display one particular video, give AdSense more freedom and let it display videos from a category or just trust the selection of the video to AdSense.
Well of course, like most things in life it’ll depend on what you want to achieve. Now that may sound like stating the obvious, but determining what you want to achieve on that particular page of your website should help you arrive at the best answer.
You should ask yourself the following questions on a page by page basis:
- Is the video being placed there primarily to generate income through the advertising?
- Is the video being placed there because it closely relates to, is the reason for, or enhances the text of the page and any income generated would be secondary consideration?
Scenarios for Using AdSense Videos
When is it going to be important to have fresh video content and when is it more important to have very specific content?
1. display one particular video
In this scenario, you may actually be using one of your own videos that you’ve uploaded to YouTube e.g. a product demonstration or a short training video. In this case the video is actually part of the page content and therefore the fact that someone may have seen it before is largely irrelevant.
2. display any videos created by a particular publisher
This is most likely to be the case when the video is not directly part of the page content, but is from a publisher that you have a relationship with and is relevant to your web site as a whole.
3. display videos from a particular category
This is a very similar scenario to scenario 2, except that you have loosened your grip on what can be displayed on your site. You’re entering the territory where something detrimental could be displayed on your site. At this point you’ve stepped over the line of using the videos to simply supplement your content and use them to generate income from your site.
4. display any video based on an assessment of your page content by Google.
This is the probably the option you’d use where you’re not overly concerned about the type of video that will be placed on your site and want to invest as little time and effort possible. It works pretty much the same way as AdSense text adverts do at the moment except for the moment video is more engaging and may have better results.
If you’ve started using AdSense video or are planning to do so I’d be interested to hear about your experiences.
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