Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

The monetization of traffic goliath YouTube has been a hot topic ever since Google bought the online video destination a few years back. This week YouTube made two big announcements in regards to new revenue streams that not only make business sense but more importantly doesn’t impact the user-experience.

On Wednesday YouTube announced YouTube Sponsored Videos, basically the same sponsored links strategy tied to Google web search but specific to YouTube content. “Sponsored Videos is a self-serve advertising platform that will allow you to promote your video to the audience you are interested in reaching in an easy, effective, democratic, and affordable way. Then, when people use YouTube to search for videos, YouTube will display the most relevant, compelling videos alongside the search results. These videos are clearly labeled as “sponsored videos” and are priced on a cost-per-click basis.”

Here is the offical video explaining how Sponsored Videos works:



Yesterday YouTube also announced that they will be serving overlay ads in their embedded partner videos. This obviously wont have the same impact as YouTube Sponsored Videos but is a strategy that makes sense regardless of how much revenue it adds to the bottom line. Up until this announcement was made YouTube only ran overlay ads against partner videos running on YouTube, allowing the monetization of partner videos no matter where the video is being played is a win-win for both YouTube and the content producer.

Google has always kept their search homepage free of clutter, unneeded text and of course ads. Well today I just noticed they added a link promoting the new T-Mobile G1 - the first android-powered phone.

When you click on the link it takes you to a splash page that lives within the Google.com domain, however that page is basically a shell to get you to click over to T-Mobiles website. I guess Google felt sending a visitor directly to T-Mobile from their homepage was pushing it - but man imaging the link-juice from that link if they did?

I am not against a company promoting its goods and services, especially on a website they own, but the Google.com homepage has always been a sanctuary for simplicity. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of things to come.

Google has been very busy the past week or so updating their Webmaster Tools functionality, the most significant addition being their new crawl errors feature - which by itself is a godsend. This morning Google added yet another feature aimed at helping webmasters make their websites safer. Webmaster Tools now tests websites that are signed up (and verified) for security flaws through their CMS. For now Google is only testing the alerts, which are deliver through the Tools message center, with a few thousand webmasters but will eventually roll it out to a broader audience. This type of interaction with Google is obviously greatly appreciated, especially for people who use various blog platforms (like WordPress) that have been susceptible to security issues / hacks in the past.

So what happens if you get one of these alerts? UPGRADE your CMS or switch platforms!

Search Engine Land confirms what was mention in a Wall Street article back on October 1st - Google will soon offer RSS feeds for web search results. The new RSS feeds will be a component of Google Alerts, which currently only sends out email alerts. RSS feeds for Google’s web search results has no exact launch date but has been long overdue as Google is the only major search engine not doing it.

The addition of a RSS feed within the Google Alerts product isn’t ground breaking, but will simplify the tracking of various keywords for things like brand / personal reputation management and social media optimization. As soon as it goes live I am going to play around with how else these RSS feeds can be utilized. Blog content anyone?

Everyone knows that online casual gaming is a huge and growing market - comScore numbers show 25%+ of people who use the internet play games online. Google just announced that they will be enabling online game developers and publishers to monetize their creations in a new way with AdSense for Games. AdSense for Games, which is in beta, will enable developers to add video ads, images ads or text ads within games where ever they see fit. For now only game publishers with a minimum of 500k plays will be allowed to participate. The Google AdWords team will initially sell the game ad placements directly to advertisers, but publishers will be able to filter which ads are shown within the game.

AdSense has enabled website owners to easily monetize their content in a effect and easy manner for awhile now - even though the pay-out per click is low, you cant beat the ease of use. AdSense for Games will have a similar impact for those online games (if it gets released into the wild) that don’t have ad integration deals. However, making it this easy for anyone to add advertisements within games opens up a cornucopia of issues - including people creating games solely to place ads in it and the obvious “overdoing it” in regards to the amount of ads shown.

Here are a couple videos explaining how AdSense for Games works and how it can be effective for advertisers: