Embedded YouTube Player with AdSense

When Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, they surely had something in mind to make money out of it. Their previous attempt to monetize YouTube videos by directly inserting non-intrusive overlay ads have been deeply criticized by users. And now, the company is implementing a different strategy to monetize YouTube’s video content by placing AdSense ads into the video player.

AdSense text-based advertising will be inserted above the video. Ads will appear as a part of the YouTube player, but outside the video content appear.

Using YouTube’s custom video player option, Web publishers can customize the theme and the layout of the player to look best on their site. Web Publishers can also choose categories of video, or let Google automatically target ads based on the content. As of now, this new features hasn’t been announced by YouTube and only a limited number of users can see this under their account. Some users are also reporting that they had this option till yesterday, but now it has disappeared. Maybe, YouTube is just doing some private beta before fully rolling it out.

As a YouTube user, I think this approach to monetize YouTube is far better than the previous one, but I doubt if it works out well for Google and Web Publishers. Darren has more information here.