There is a surprising announcement from Google regarding its advertising program Adsense. Google is shutting down its Video adsense. It came as a surprise to many because Google is constantly exploring new territories and expanding its grounds to make its Adsense program and the advertising network stronger. Google has over half of its revenue generated through its advertising networks. In this scenario to scrape one of its revenue generation streams is rather surprising. Advertisers will not get the adsense videos displayed in their sites. This will come into effect from the end of April 2009. This can upset the publishers as they will not be able to signup for the revenue sharing through adsense videos.
However, publishers can still embed videos in their websites from YouTube but this cannot be done via the adsense interface anymore. They have to get it done the usual way of visiting YouTube and get the codes to embed the videos of their choice. As of now, users will be able to launch the videos in their adsense slots by selecting the video option in the adsense interface. Users will also be ale to select the videos to be added to the adsense publishing.
The latest decision of Google to scrape adsense videos make many suspect that it was not successful in generating enough revenue through videos. The click through rate should have been considerably lower when compared to the regular text ads. Moreover, people may not wait patiently for the videos to load. Video ads also take a lot of space on the webpage.
Google’s adsense videos were launched barely a year ago. This program was launched in February 2008. Just a year has paused by and Google has decided to role the tent. Many publishers were too hopeful that adsense videos will increase their revenue manifold. But to their surprise all those who opted for video adsense reverted to text ads and banner ads once they noticed that their adsense revenue dropped very badly. Internet users are used to clicking on links rather than on videos; we have been used to banners and links for too long to change the habit too swiftly. Probably if Google were to continue with its video ads for long enough people would have got used to the concept of video ads and the click through rate would have increased over a period of time.
There is another side to the coin; advertisers too may not have been too enthusiastic about video ads as it would have been lot more complicated to launch video ads while they can launch their text ads in a matter of few clicks. Moreover, video ads did not go well in countries where the internet speed is not up to the standard.
Google probably has enough reasons to justify its scraping of the video ads.