Adsense and You

Adsense earnings recently took another leap with the addition of YouTube to its repertoire of advertising mediums. While enhancing websites with the ever popular video medium, YouTube has added another dimension to the Google Adsense business model.

With the addition of YouTube advertising, webmasters can now place video as well as text and banner units on their sites. Just like all of the Adsense contextual advertising units, the video units are customizable and can be modified to fit the look and feel of a webmaster's site. Adding video advertising to a website translates into more income generated when viewers click on the companion advertising being served by Google. The text or image advertising is displayed at the top of the video unit, and can also come in the form of text overlay ads that appear at the bottom of the video screen. Just like all of Google's contextual advertising units, video units are related to the sites content and the payments are made to the webmaster based on either the Cost per Click or Cost-Per-Thousand (M, Roman for 1000) model.

Video advertising can be added three different ways: using Google's content categories, choosing individual content providers or by accepting automatically targeted video which is contextual much the same way text link units and content units are placed - through keyword or keyword phrase content on the website.

With the addition of video units called widgets, a website is simple. The webmaster copies the code for a specific video unit onto the website either in a widget or into the website's template. Adsense Help Center gives step-by-step instructions on how-to do it and you can also check in the Google Adsense blog for any updates or tips and techniques to maximize the YouTube presentation on your site.

Most industry experts feel that the addition of YouTube video units has great potential. This forecast is based upon a few factors. Google Adsense's network of publishers and advertisers is already in place. YouTube has become almost universal for embedding video into outside websites through the use of adding codes to templates or through various widgets. This means that it is something that is already familiar to most marketers on the net. For publishers already familiar with Adsense, this offers another avenue of significant income. Google intends to share the revenue gained with both webmasters and content providers alike.

As of today, there are already more than 100 content providers affiliated with YouTube taking advantage of the video program.

Website publishers also see the tremendous potential that adding video advertising to their Adsense portfolio because they know the power of video when it comes to viewer attention. The program is considered a win-win for all involved. The key to the success will fall in the level of relevance the video feeds provide when dealing with different content on websites.

"The closer the match, the higher the click through rate, the more profitable the video advertising ". If it's profitable, there will be a lot more advertisers jumping on the bandwagon," said one webmaster.

Relevance of the video feeds seems to be the biggest concern that most webmasters have when it comes to video advertising. Because the number of advertisers is still small, some users are reporting good matches and others have been less satisfied.

Google is still tweaking the interface to deal with the bugs and problems, but one user said that the search parameters saved in the profiles was easy for a webmaster to control which directly related to contextual video choices being made by Google.

Video tapes tagged with specific terms are being shown on a site, and it all came from what the profile reflected.

Adsense has offered some advice to webmasters with regard to getting the best video advertising choices. They feel that if webmasters provide tightly focused, relevant keywords, that will go a long way towards matching the content and video that is fed to the website.