As described at this New York Times story, Google is rolling out ad-supported video to all members of the search engine’s AdSense program — something the company launched as a limited beta trial a huge opportunity for publishers, who can have their video content distributed across millions of blogs, and get paid for doing so. Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is here).
Om Malik, however — who I consider to be a pretty smart guy, and no slouch when it comes analyzing online business models — is underwhelmed). As Om points out, a potential Achilles heel for the program is the relevance of the content. Google’s existing text ads often contain laughably irrelevant links, but those are relatively easy to ignore. How much more irritating will it be to find irrelevant video clips popping up? And will anyone click on them?
A commenter named Mike B at Read/Write Web — where Marshall Kirkpatrick seems fairly positive on the idea — makes shows up on the TechCrunch post):
“I don’t get what’s so great about this. How many readers want to watch randomly selected youtube videos on some 3rd party website?
If the videos were selected by the website owner and attached to specific articles like current youtube embeds, that might make sense, but I don’t see much traction in this idea.”
Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove, which has a similar ad-supported video distribution service, says in more details on the Google launch, including a screenshot of the video player with an ad banner on top, and MG Siegler at ParisLemon says Google’s effort is as well.
Suggest a Correction
Found an error or have a suggestion? Let us know and we'll review it.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!