“I don’t know if Google can have a success if it doesn’t involve an algorithm”

So says Kathy Sharpe when talking about Google’s efforts to make video advertising work. Seems the guys over at Google are having some teething problems selling ads on YouTube.

The success of Google undoubtly was, and is, its ability to deliver both relvant search results for its users and also target text ads for its advertisers. So, what’s the big difference between selling text ads for its search engine and its search network and selling video ads on Youtube?

Apparently some big advertisers are worried that their ads will appear next to ameteur videos and copyright ligitation has also hampered the sales push.

The bottom line in selling ads is advertisers want to see a return for their buck. I don’t see the bigger companies being too interested in the quality of websites their text ads appear beside? Why is that? Maybe its because they are counting the clicks rather than worrying about the SERP’s.

Have you ever seen a video ad on Youtube? It looks like this:

So, when you are watching a video, these text ads appear at the bottm of the screen. Normally I just click on the X and close the ad. This form of advertising , to me, is far different to the model that works so well on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), i.e. text ads. On a SERP, you are actively looking for something and if a PPC ad appears to fit the bill then you’ll likely click on the ad, but when I’m watching a video, I want to watch the video and not look at ads.

I know they are trying to put in relevant ads, but I think the underlying model here will be harder to achieve success with than the adwords model.

Another method Google is using to push video advertising is by using syndication, so just like Google Adsense, but with video (Video Units), here’s an example;

You can see that there is a syndicated video here, one that’s matched to my tags of , ’search engine optimisation, search engines, algorithm, Google, Yahoo, Live, search engine marketing’ ?

Did you watch the video? Did you see the ads? Would you be likely to click on the ads?

Have you tried using video units on Google’s Adsense network? How did you get on?