Google has announced a pilot with a small group of publishers to test streaming video ads. Writing on the Inside AdSense blog, product marketing manager Christina Lee said, “Just as AdSense adds value to the text content on your website and is useful for your users, we think these in-stream ads in video will add value to publishers’ video content and help to deepen engagement with users watching the videos.”
In this pilot, the selected publishers, with their own video content, will be able to control which videos get ads, and when the ads play in those videos.
This is different than the standalone click-to-play video ads Google offers to publishers in its content network. It’s also different from the video distribution tests Google did with Warner Music and Sony BMG in January, and with MTV last August, both of which paired video content from those providers with video ads from Google advertisers.