After nearly a year in closed beta, Google is expected to announce tonight that its AdSense for Video program is now open to publishers. When the program’s pilot was announced last May, AdSense for Video was intended to serve up video-in-video ads. Today the video part is gone, replaced by CPM banners and CPC text overlays.
Launch participant Brightcove said in a release tonight that “Publishers and content providers can control which videos get which ads and when the ads play in each video.” Am I the only one that hates those damned pop up text overlay ads that show up on other services’ videos?
Last October, Google started letting AdSense publishers include YouTube videos as ads on their sites. Last week the company announced that it is experimenting with running video ads on its own search results pages.
There is clearly a lot of room to experiment with video ads.
In some cases even interstitial videos inside a video can be done well, check out almost any of the work of video ad network Castfire, for example. Castfire has a very sophisticated technology for serving up ads in video. While at first blush this San Francisco startup might seem to be in trouble given tonight’s news – in reality, AdSense for Video will be about monetizing bulk, remainder and less-than-high quality video more than anything else. That leaves plenty of room in the market for startups taking other approaches, like serving video ads inside of videos – as Google said it was going to do.
