Google’s Video Content

11.10 Google’s Video Content

Fig. 11.5 Google’s video content come from YouTube and come with two kinds of ads.

The future of the Internet on mobile phones might be a little unclear. The future of video on the Internet seems to have been settled.

Users love it.

They watch television on YouTube and they’ve become used to seeing videos on blogs and websites. Even Oprah has now launched her own YouTube channel.

That’s both a challenge and an opportunity for publishers. It’s a challenge because creating original video content can appear difficult and look expensive. Actually, it doesn’t have to be either, although at the very least, you will need a digital camera.

And after putting together “The Next Internet Millionaire,” I can tell you it’s also a lot of fun!

But video is also an opportunity because you don’t need original content. There are tons of clips available on the Web that you can place on your own site and earn from the ads on your page and embedded ads in the video itself.

Two of the best places to find videos like these are Revver and Google itself.

Revver doesn’t have as big an inventory as YouTube, but it does share ad revenue. The site embeds an ad into the video, lets publishers place the clip on their own site and gives them 20 percent of the income. That might not sound like much, but don’t forget, you’re getting the content for free and you can still put AdSense units around it.

The alternative is to use Google’s video content... which is drawn from YouTube.

The videos come with companion ads placed above the screen, which can be either text or image-based, and overlay ads which appear at the bottom of the screen. Both can pay by impression or by click.

Interestingly, the overlay ad changes as the film progresses and users can even choose to move back and forward through the ads. They can also choose to close the overlay, which might not be so good.

You can only place one video unit on a page but you can change the surrounding color to blend the unit into your site, choose from three different sizes and select content by category, creator or receive it automatically targeted to keywords you supply.

Have you noticed what’s missing?

That’s right, at the moment, you can’t choose individual clips yourself.

That’s a huge hole in the plan and there have been complaints that Google has been serving automated video that isn’t very relevant.

If you’d like to give it a try, click the AdSense Setup tab and choose the video units link. You’ll have to link your AdSense account with a YouTube account — you’ll only have to do that once — and you’ll then be free to create your AdSense player, choose content and paste the code onto your page. You won’t even need to host the video on your own site.

I think these video units can be a great way to enhance the content on any website. They’re very simple to use, offer additional revenue streams — and give you one less content post that you have to create yourself.

Much though will depend on the sort of creators available in your content field or the clips that Google decides to give you.

Test to see whether Revver or Google gives you the most revenue — I suspect that it will depend on the content of the video, so make a point of searching both for good clips — then get into the habit of offering films about once a week.