Showing how quickly the Internet TV and online video business
moves these days, Blinkx has launched its own advertising platform just
a day after Google officially announced AdSense video units.
Both of these new online advertising options allows
publishers to
earn extra revenue, but Blinkx
AdHoc
is much more universal than Google’s new offering which is limited to
select YouTube
videos.
With AdHoc, users can add text advertisements to video from
any
of the major video-sharing sites including YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Revver, Metacafe, Veoh, DailyMotion,
and more.
More Potential Than AdSense
The process is simple and can have website owners and bloggers
set
up with ads on video in a matter of minutes. Dare I say it has more
potential than even AdSense video units at this point.
To generate the ad-embedded video player, users simply paste
the
embed code from any video website into AdHoc.
After this, there is only
one step which involves choosing whether to display the advertisements
directly above the video or as an overlay that consumes the top 20% of
the video (Google
also offer both
options).
Once that is complete, AdHoc provides the ad-enabled code to
be copied and pasted into a website. When viewers click on these ads
Blinkx will share 50% of that revenue.
Leveraging Ads From Multiple Sources
The primary advantage of AdHoc over AdSense
video units
is that with AdHoc users can take any video and add advertisements. If
there are no ads in the AdHoc database that the algorithm determines
relevant to your website, then none are displayed with that
video.
With
AdSense, however, there are only a limited selection of videos that can
be displayed with ads, primarily those from YouTube partners. Not only
that, but AdHoc leverages ads from “multiple sources including a number
of PPC networks,” which should help it compare to Google’s large
variety of advertising clients.
“There will be times when there are few or even no ads
shown, and you won’t make money. However, we believe that, in the long
term, keeping your viewers happy and engaged is more important, so we
aren’t going to waste their time with irrelevant and annoying
promotions.”
As far as payment, AdHoc has a $20 minimum monthly payout and
sends funds through PayPal.
The amount publishers are paid depends on how many of the ads are
clicked on and how much each of those ads pay per click.
With the limitations of the AdSense-embedded video players, I
think
I will give Blinkx AdHoc a chance. It definitely gives you more options.
Michael Garrett is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
