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Thursday, May 24, 2007 |
A closed pilot program for video ads on AdSense will launch this week; it's a limited test that give online video publishers control of the ad displays.
Editor's Note: The start of Google's AdSense video ad test offers site publishers some control over those ad displays. As an advertiser paying for a premium video spot, how comfortable are you with this feature? Let us know in the comments section.
Online video, we hear, is the latest and greatest thing since Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet. It's reaching a point where the norm is to find a three to five minute video on sites that used to be able to deliver the same content in text, which could be read in under a minute.
I know what you're thinking. "David, you are a fossil. Online writers are a dying breed, and you should be pleased to feel the crush of evolution at your throat." Fine. Think that way. I'll be waiting for evolution with a smile and half of Cold Steel's inventory.
The people have voted with their browsing habits, however, and video has been a big winner. Witness Google's purchase of YouTube as validation. Video online offers a level of control for people that broadcast models could never hope to approach.
A few fortunate site publishers will get to try the next great thing from Google AdSense. Christine Lee, AdSense Product Marketing Manager, talked about it on the Google AdSense blog.
"With this pilot, publishers control when the ads play in their videos and choose which videos get the ads," Lee said. She also provided a nice recap of Google's video ad efforts to date:
- Click-to-play video ads: This is a video ad type on our content network. Any publisher opted into image ads and using one of the supported formats may see these click-to-play video ads on their sites.
- AdSense video distribution and sponsorship: We ran 2 pilots that allowed publishers to choose video channels (short-form video clips bundled with video ads) to display on their sites.
- AdSense for Video pilot: This is what we're announcing today - we're extending AdSense to online video content. Publishers in this test will be able to define at what point in their videos that streaming video ads will appear
If the test proves profitable, you can bet more publishers will want in on the AdSense video ad program. That will give Google a new challenge:
Building up an inventory of video advertisements for AdSense display.
We expect Google will keep a tight grip on the number of publishers involved until they can bring in enough advertisers willing to pay what should be a premium for video ad placement.
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Feedburner Fears After Google's Grab
By David Utter
Staff Writer | WebProNews
Things change when a large, publicly traded company acquires a smaller firm. Google's $100 million pickup of Feedburner has elicited some negative speculation.
The purchase of Feedburner by Google presents an interesting scenario for the growth of RSS feedreading adoption. It's been our opinion that such adoption will get a boost from Microsoft, which has built RSS feed technology into its newest builds of Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Vista.
Feedburner makes feeds easier for the common Internet surfer to use. Microsoft's products will encourage a lot of people to subscribe to feeds. Google's acquisition lets them see all of the Feedburner subscriptions have, whether through a Microsoft product or any other reader.
With Microsoft putting feedreading into the hands of millions of computer users, Google just has to encourage feed publishers to use Feedburner, already an outstanding product.
See what just happened there? As Todd Osborne noted at Geek News Central, this is one more step toward Google closing the loop and knowing a lot more about people than they may realize:
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Video Embedded Inside an Email
Before everyone jumps all over my back for asking this, let me preface my question -
I understand placing video in email is risky, as many ISPs will render it useless.
That being said, I read an article published by Marketing Sherpa which describes how one email marketing company had some success using video embedded (presumably streamed) into the email.
The article can be found here.
My question is this - logistically, how is this possible? In terms of coding the actual HTML, how can a video be embedded without using < embed >, < object >, or JavaScript so that it renders in most ISPs?
I'm not concerned with bandwith issues either... just the specifics about how this is programmed. Does anyone have any idea how this is done?
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