Pay Per Click YouTube

Massive news this week with the announcement on the Google Blog that YouTube will be linking up with Google's AdSense to allow 'Promoted Video' ads. Previously, all YouTube Promoted Video ads were managed on YouTube at ads.youtube.com. Essentially YouTube’s Promoted Videos, which had previously only shown next to site search results and in the right column next to currently playing videos, will now be available through a huge number of AdSense using publishers.

The move may seem like a no-brainer considering that YouTube's parent company is Google, but it's a move that I'm sure has taken a serious amount of planning. The new Promoted Video ads will only be available to publishers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, in English but Google has stated that additional languages and regions will be coming online very soon. From a Publisher's point of view, the Promoted Video ads will work exactly the same as the standard AdSense units. They will be contextually related to each page and will function on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Obviously the standard ad auction system will still be in place, so no-doubt premium sites look set to start making serious extra cash.

Considering that over 20 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute, it's almost odd to think that this is a move that hadn't already happened. Having said that, the real job now is to try and attract premium content curators and producers into using the service and effectively pushing that content out into the web. Not one to miss a trick, YouTube are all over this with a premium ‘Promoted Videos’ feature that lets you pay to expose your video to other users. In essence, you can now just buy network video advertising space through an automated manual service - genius!