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Marketing Online
Google Money-Printing Machine Turns Focus to Videos
By Devin Bryant A whole micro-economy has sprung up around Google AdSense and AdWords text ads -- greatly benefiting small businesses. Now Google is targeting its ad engine at YouTube videos.
Google's "magic-sauce" for its video ad program are small banners or overlay text ads that will inconspicuously -- but in a highly-targeted fashion -- attach themselves to the video window. By focusing on text ads radio than video "pre-roll" advertising, Google is hoping to replicate the success of its ubiquitous search ads in the video world.
Hundreds if not thousands of blogs and Web sites pay the bills by posting Google ads, and millions more businesses drive traffic to their sites by purchasing target keywords.
According to Google, Web sites have three choices: they can choose the categories of videos to run, select content from YouTube partners, or choose to have video automatically targeted. Google will control the program rather tightly at the start: so far only 100 content providers on YouTube are participating and content must be cleared before it can be included.
The real power will come as Google expands the program to the million of video clips it is hosting on YouTube -- but given how much of that content is copyrighted such a move may be tricky.
So what's in it for a small business? For advertisers, another way to attract potential buyers who are by definition more highly-engaged in a topic because they are watching a video on the topic.
For publishers, embedding a YouTube video on your site, like the one above (note: the video above does NOT include the ad units, though the video shows them), could now deliver pennies on the dollar.
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