Google Confirms Video Advertising Format Will Be InVideo

February 22nd, 2008

Google started testing video advertising on YouTube in August 2007 and announce AdSense for video as a pilot in May. The programme has been rolled out gradually and is now officially available to AdSense publishers in the USA that meet certain minimum requirements.

Various video advertising formats are currently available to advertisers, including pre-roll, post-roll, branded player, in-player banners and sponsored search ads. When Google first started testing in-player banners, which they call InVideo advertising, quite a few experts in the industry were surprised. Google themselves did not confirm whether InVideo ads would remain the norm for all their video advertising.

Yesterday’s announcement on the Inside AdSense blog not only announced the availability of video advertising to online video publishers via AdSense, but also confirmed that InVideo would be the format used for these ads. Even though the programme is currently in beta, this move can be seen as confirmation that Google’s testing of InVideo ads on YouTube has shown it to be the ideal video advertising format for them.
InVideo ads are shown during a video in the form of a relatively inobtrusive banner along the bottom of the video, like a text overlay. The payment for in video ads is on a CPM basis.

InVideo Ads From Google

Google is also offering text overlay ads, which are contextually targeted to signals in a publisher’s videos and on the page where the video is posted. Payment for text overlay ads will on a CPC basis. This format will be unique to AdSense for video and AdSense video units.

Text Overlay Ads From Google

AdSense for video will be available as of now only to publishers based in the United States with a minimum of one million video streams served per month, and will be in English to start with. The format will gradually be made available to smaller players. During the test phase advertisers like BMW, Universal Studios and Twentieth Century Fox etc. were invited to advertise on sites like BobVila.com, eHow, ExpertVillage, TheNewsRoom, Revver, blip.tv, and GodTube.

A video advertising solutions page has also been set up to help advertisers find out about how they can place InVideo ads on video sites in Google’s content network and on YouTube, and for publishers to learn more about all the options they have to monetise their video content as well as non-video content via video advertising.

Google Video Advertising Solutions

Tags: advertising, cpm, google, google adwords, invideo, ppc, video, youtube