Last month Google quietly invited a number of Adsense publishers to try out their AdSense Video Distribution and Sponsorship Pilot. This is a new innovative video advertising platform that Google is playing around with.
How it works
Publishers insert a medium-sized 300 x 250 video player somewhere on their site (an example is pictured above – see more here). This video player contains video content from a specific channel. Example channels include the NBA channel which features basketball content, or the Epicurious Cooking Techniques channel which features cooking videos.
These little niched channels aim to contain compelling video content that also feature adverts. The video content comes in the form of one or more playlists of video. Each playlist is made up of short-form video clips of up to a few minutes in length, with ads inserted in between each clip. Every time a viewer begins to watch an advert Google bills the advertiser and also pays a percentage of that to the publisher.
I guess the idea is to keep up to date and interesting videos on a publishers site that their readers will be interested in. For example, you might have a basketball website and include the NBA Channel on your site on the homepage, this would feature the latest match highlights. People watch the highlights, and hence the adverts and the publisher gets paid.
This sounds like a similar model to the BiggyTV idea that I talked about the other day.
Will it pay?
Whether it will pay depends on whether people will actually watch the videos. I have the feeling that if people wanted to watch videos they would head on over to YouTube. CenterNetworks tried it out and removed it quite promptly when the ads did not pay.
Has anyone else tried it who’d like to share their experience?
