Google Video Ad Pilot Program

I just received an email from Google informing me that I have been invited to participate in their new video sponsorship pilot ads:

Thank you for your continued participation in the Google AdSense program.

We are always working to improve AdSense and seeking out opportunities for publishers to help us test and provide feedback on new offerings. Soon, we’ll be launching an AdSense video distribution and sponsorship pilot and would like to invite you to participate. This is an exciting opportunity for you to test out new forms of high-quality, engaging, and relevant video content on your site and help us to shape this new offering while it’s still in the early stages. Additionally, the video content is ad-supported which provides a new incremental revenue opportunity for you.

In the coming days, we’ll be enabling your AdSense accounts with the option to select video content and display them on your AdSense sites. We’ve assembled premium video content providers including The Wall Street Journal Online, CondeNet’s Epicurious and Style.com, and LX.TV to create a compelling mix of editorial, fashion, travel, wine, and culinary-themed video channels. We feel that these video channels will complement your content and cater to your audience, which is why we have invited you to participate.

How it works:

A content provider, for example Warner Music Group, defines multiple video channels such as “Rock Videos,” or videos featuring the “Divas of Pop Music.” A publisher can select one of these video channels and embed it on their AdSense site. Visitors to the site can then browse and watch ad-supported video playlists within that video channel. In addition, Warner Music Group can update the channel with new video content to provide websites with a steady stream of content that will engage and excite visitors over the course of the pilot.

A few important notes:

• The pilot will run for 4 weeks over which time content providers will be creating new playlists with fresh, diverse, and relevant content for your site’s audience. The content within a video playlist will be updated regularly, ensuring freshness of content and improved response from your users.
• The video playlists are sized at 300 x 250 and are user-initiated. Nothing will play until a user interacts with the video and users will be able to skip over any video content and ads within a playlist.
• You may display a video playlist in addition to the maximum 3 ad units per page. We recommend creating new content space for the video playlist rather than making any changes to your current AdSense ad implementation.
• Content providers may choose to refresh or remove available video content at any time and for any reason. In the event video content is not available, the video player space on your pages will display standard text ads which you will be paid for as normal. You are also free to remove the video player from your pages at any time during this pilot.

In order to participate, no action is required on your part at this time. We’ll send you a note in the coming week once we have enabled your account to select video content, along with instructions on how to get started. In the meantime, we recommend looking through your site and think about where it makes sense to insert the video player and what your users will be most responsive to…

This is the first time we have been invited to participate in an adsense pilot program so it should be fun to see how the entire process works and hopefully it will be an area where we can generate some profit.