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What are Google Video Ads 

Very recently Google has announced its entry into the world of video advertising – giving the publishers an option to use its AdSense network for displaying targeted video ads. The spots provided can be maximum two minutes long and the best part is that advertiser will be charged only if a visitor clicks through to an advertiser Web site. The publishers can make the payment through ‘Pay-per-Impression’ or ‘pay-per-1000 impressions’.

The advertisements can be displayed either through Google's contextual technology or some particular web sites that are selected by the merchant. These ads can be run and viewed by all those AdSense publishers who accept image advertisements. It is up to Google to decide whether to show text listings, an image ad or video spot based on which has the highest effective yield. These videos are user initiated, with a static image that can be played by prospects directly within the ad unit. The company also hopes to bring the same kind of precisely targeted, user-friendly and accountable advertising found in search to other ad forms like video, which on the Internet have often resembled TV placements that interrupt viewing. Google has successfully tested video ads with big names like Paramount Pictures and General Motors. 

To start with, Google came up with some free videos (with advertising) from the Google Video Store. Unfortunately the video store was faced with some harsh criticisms and bad reviews as experts commented that the service was rolled out prematurely. It must be remembered that though this is one of the biggest steps undertaken by Google to enter into brand advertising, it must compete against the big players like Apple that enjoys a huge share in the digital audio market, along with the likes of Movielink and CinemaNow.

Though Google has a penchant for automatic and simple text advertising, this new form is designed in such a way so that the advertisers get an opportunity to select those videos only with which they want to link their advertisements. This offer will last for approximately one week and will permit viewers to watch almost 2000 videos from eight separate content producers for absolutely free. These videos will be accompanied with features like ad banners that will be visible throughout the program and a short video advertisement that will be tacked on to the end of the clip. Nevertheless, it will continue to sell its original ad supported content and videos for its consumers.

One of the biggest advantages of this ad model by Google is the extremely flexible pricing pattern. This gives the advertisers an opportunity to experiment with all the various business models along with their search for viable Internet distribution business practices. The whole concept of ad supported Internet had attained enormous success with ABC; today this company enjoys the viewership of more than 11 million audiences! The million dollar question now is this-Will Google also be able to bring in more users with their will free, ad supported media content? Well only two factors – the mechanism used to serve the video and the quality of the video will be able to determine the prospective success of the service. The edge that Google has over its competitor ABC is that the latter requires Flash 8 for viewing its videos; whereas though Google Videos also use Flash, it does not require the latest and updated version and hence completely usable on the Linux platform. All now Google needs to do is to bring in interesting content to increase its viewership - their free videos included college sports, classic movies like Mr. Magoo and some wrestling!

Nevertheless, a few observations about this service:

• Even though the movie selection is not very impressive, the service offered is fairly decent. 

• The movies load at a more or less comfortable speed and tracking through the movie also work tolerably well.

• The ads at the top of the window are simple and static and do not interfere with the movie; moreover, the ad banner does not appear in the full screen window mode!