Online Media Cultist

The first sentence of the third paragraph of a New York Times story covering Google’s launch of video ad units to its Adsense members that include YouTube videos says it all: “The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google’s network, known as AdSense.”

We also know that Google will share revenue from the ads with web publishers and video content creators. So beyond that, what does it all mean?

Mathew Ingram frames the big picture question: “Whether this is a breakthrough use of YouTube as an advertising platform, or a lame scramble by Google to justify the billions it spent for the video-sharing site, depends on who you believe.”

Andy Beal provides some detail on video content providers that will be launched with the program, such as TV Guide Broadband and lonelygirl15.

A significant question will surely be whether or not Google/YouTube can provide compelling video content that a) web publishers will be willing to run on their sites and b) whether said content will be interesting enough for audiences to sit through to make money for three parties: web publishers, video content creators, and Google/YouTube.

A bunch of websites, including Lost Remote, are quoting Brightcove’s CEO as saying that getting high traffic sites to run “arbitrary content” is a difficult proposition. Which may well be true, but something tells me that Google will have more success at this than Brightcove.

Overall, I see this as an interesting experiment and strategy, but whether or not it will be successful remains to be seen. It’s certainly a side-run around the big question stemming from Google’s purchase of YouTube: how will they make money on a massively popular video site fueled by user contributed video content? We’re starting to see the answer: carefully selected commercial and “amateur” video will have some form of advertising, some of which will run on YouTube, and now we see that some will run on websites that already are part of the Google Adsense program.

Which is one of the places where Google makes real money.