Google Testing In-Stream Video Ads

Latest news is: Google is now testing in-Stream Video ads:

Ad creative will be less than :30 and made skippable for users. Publishers will be able to select which videos to monetize, and track their performance using AdSense. Publishers can also choose where the ads will appear within the videos. Akin to standard AdSense deals, ad revenue will be split between the website publisher and Google.

And – though slightly unrelated: They now also sell TV Ads, as found on their AdSense ads.

Seems like they’re really moving into video ads in many ways now.

Product Placement in Europe soon official

Paid display of products in TV-Shows without any referrence to the story was – so far – illegal in Europe. Or at least in Germany. Some German TV stations lately got into trouble for displaying products in soap operas. This might seem trivial to people in the US, where this is normal, as far as I know. But in Germany it caused a big scandal.
Now the European Commission put a decret up, which allows TV stations to display products in TV shows. Only prerequisite: it needs to be clear that it is an advertisement. I wonder, how they will manage to indicate that, without interrupting the story?
Kids TV shows still must not have any product placements, but can now be interrupted every 30 minutes instead of 45 minutes, writes German weekly magazine Spiegel.

Is this the „answer“ to increasing media fragmentation, consumer control and ad resistance? It is certainly a nice try, but I don’t think that will make it any better. I even think it will make things worse. Increase the clutter and users will find more ways to blank out any advertisements.

Links & News, 23.05.07

The changing landscape of (blog) search

Steve Rubel writes about the changing landscape of blog search. Google killed it, he claims, and it seems plausible.

For one, there is good reason why the attractiveness of search engines like technorati has faltered:

The improvements are nice, but I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007. […] While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. The lines are blurrier. Google News, for example, has lots of blogs. More importantly, the big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you’re seeking. It won’t care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting.

Is there anything that will put an end to Google’s dominance? Probably not. But it was never within their own fields that big monolithic companies were beat. IBM still offers some of the best servers. Microsoft is still a quasi-Monopoly in PC OS.

Whoever „beats“ Google will have find a totally new field of activity.

By the way, I love to take sneak preview of what Google is toying with