I am sure all of you have gotten or will get the same email. Google is retiring the videos ads option in adsense. I have my own feeling as to why theses ads are not performing as they had hoped. Plain and Simple, there was no customization of the ad/video sizes. The dimensions of the video units didn't fit into any know advertising dimensions that I know of, and even the 160 vertical strip was too bulky and didn't fit seamlessly into a web page or blog. This to me was the biggest downfall of the whole program. You can't expect webmasters to redesign an area, to display one type of ad. For the life of me I could not figure out why a simple 300 x 250 unit was so hard for them to offer, or why you couldn't adjust the size of the unit like a normal You Tube video to fit into available areas on your site. Secondly, the video player was pretty ugly, and bulky as well. How much room do you need to shout "Ads by Google" on a video unit. Why couldn't this be accomplished on the video itself, by the play button or the start screen ? The video units was the only new feature that gave me a little hope of trying adsense again on my trafficked sites, but it was too hard to work with, and once again Google keeps confusing ground breaking technology and industry leader with trying to change the way that we design and publish our websites. Here is the email you should all be getting: ### Hi, We're writing to let you know that we'll be retiring AdSense video units at the end of April. After reviewing this feature, we've found that it hasn't been performing as well as we had hoped, so we've decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites. We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won't generate earnings from them once this change occurs. If you'd still like to display free video content from YouTube, you can do so through YouTube.com directly: visit any specific video page for the embed code, or sign in to your YouTube account to create a playlist. For more information about embedding YouTube videos, please visit http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=57788. Alternatively, if you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit. Although video units are being retired, other video offerings within AdSense aren't affected. Video ads may still appear on your pages and AdSense for video is still available for eligible publishers. If you'd like more information about the retiring of video units, please visit our Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12182. Thanks for your support of video units in the past, and we appreciate your patience and cooperation. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team
wow thats big news man i hadnt checked my email today. i never used the video ads anyway it was to hard to figure out. but thanks thats certianly breaking news +r
Wow! This is a good update as I have not look into my emails lately. But I knew and heard from a lot of marketers that is was not really making any good conversions. I tried it myself and got nothing for nearly 6 months. Thanks for the info JulieV
It's good to go. I tried many of times but I always end up moving in a circle between my adsense account and youtube account. It was all to buggy to get rid of.
Thats news to me.... Checking my mail now for this latest news. Now, all webmaster blogs got another topic to discuss about in their blogs for the next 1-2 days! LOL.......
I did search just to see how many blogs have the exact same story and headline, and this post came up first in the serps. (When I used the term "Retiring") I should have posted an article instead of a post,
I had thought about looking into video ads a while back, guess it's a good thing that I didn't waste my time. Thanks for sharing!
I mentioned this in a thread yesterday and thought it was old news. Big surprise another lamebrain idea by the Google Adsense Team. They are begging competitors to pick up their slack with each new failed idea. They are starting to smell a lot like Yahoo and AOL, and believe me someone is going to move in and take a piece of that Google Pie
I read up that Google was retiring Adsense referral program. However, there is a rumor that Google is also offering the “Google Affilate Network†as an alternative but will work only for U.S traffic to your site. Is this true? Does that mean, we are unable to make anything of Google except 'Google Affiliate Network' and U.S Traffic only? If that's the case, that mean I have to look at an affiliate program like amazon and hoping my website can get approved.
I didn't read about that. I don't use Adsense very much. The video ads were the only thing that I was actually interested in, but after numerous emails for support concerning the difficulty of embedding them with the wacky dimensions, and no reply..I finally got this in the mail. I guess that's why I never got a reply . I do agree that another program has an opening to take market share. It would be a perfect opportunity for someone with the money to start an ad network with better looking ads, a more consistent payout structure, using the dominance of Google traffic to display them...that would be a nice little "How do you do".
If they were making money they'd keep them, simple as that (they've already invested in the technology). It just goes to show that you bunging adverts in every type of media doesn't work.
I think video ads are a great idea, it's just that Google went to far out of their way to make them difficult to work with, and over intrusive for embedding them on a website or blog. One of the biggest drawbacks of Google ads for me is the large tab on them advertising for adwords "Ads by Google". It's actually 2 ads in one. The main ad, you of course get what ever it is they decide to pay on the click, but if someone clicks to find out more about adwords, you get nothing. Google gets free advertising on your site for adwords with every adsense ad, that they don't pay you for.
It does. It goes right to this page: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/ads/ads_1.html Why don't you get a cut if someone signs up for Adwords through that ad ? And on the Video ads it was even bigger. It's free advertising for them which I am sure has drawn thousands of new customers from seeing the ads placed on websites, and pennies for displaying the content ads. If Google pays for displaying ads, why don't they pay webmasters to display their own ? Now this is common for advertising programs to display their logo along with the ad, but Google's is BIG, and intrusive, and with the fluctuating TOS and rates, it's just too much for me to give out precious real estate...and since the adwords referral program is defunct, or at least I haven't heard anything about it in months...to me it's free advertising on my site.