Google says its cut for content and search ads goes toward the "costs for our continued investment in AdSense -- including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads." These costs are yet to be solidified for their other AdSense offerings, such as mobile applications, feeds, games and YouTube ads, and thus these splits were not revealed today.

"AdSense now offers the ability to monetize web and site search! WebSearch plus AdSense for search combines Google's powerful search with monetized and customizable search results pages. Simply placing the code on any web page that meets our program criteria will generate a WebSearch box, allowing users to search without leaving your site, and providing additional revenue for you."

Monetize?! Eh? Anyway tonight I added Google Search to my blog, in the header bar. I doubt I'll be "monetizing" much out of this, but I did need Search functionality so this is very handy. You can search my weblog or the World Wide Web. Give it a try :-)

Launch participant Brightcove said in a release tonight that "Publishers and content providers can control which videos get which ads and when the ads play in each video." Am I the only one that hates those damned pop up text overlay ads that show up on other services' videos?

There is clearly a lot of room to experiment with video ads.

In some cases even interstitial videos inside a video can be done well, check out almost any of the work of video ad network Castfire, for example. Castfire has a very sophisticated technology for serving up ads in video. While at first blush this San Francisco startup might seem to be in trouble given tonight's news - in reality, AdSense for Video will be about monetizing bulk, remainder and less-than-high quality video more than anything else. That leaves plenty of room in the market for startups taking other approaches, like serving video ads inside of videos - as Google said it was going to do.

Now before you get all righteous on me, remember this is a test. If the ads aren't contextual enough, or they detract from my writing, or readers threaten me with bodily harm - then I'll take the ads away.

But as I've stated before, essentially RSS feeds are no different from HTML webpages in this Web 2.0 world. RSS and HTML are the primary means of publishing and viewing content on the Web today. Indeed, RSS is arguably more important than HTML nowadays, especially for blogs. So if I put ads on my website (which I do), why not put them in my RSS feed too?

The other thing is that it's an incentive for publishers to use a full-text RSS feed. I've always done that anyway, because of what I outlined above - RSS is (what I call) a "first-class citizen" of content publishing. However a lot of people still publish excerpted feeds and so ads may be the tipping point for full-text feeds.

That's all the theory anyway, let's see how it pans out. I'm very interested to see how contextual the ads are, given this is a topic-focused blog. I'm interested in how readers react to the ads. And of course I'm keen to see if I make more than coffee money from them. Feel free to email or leave comments if you have feedback about the ads.

Today, Google announced the launch of Google AdSense for Games, a flavor of AdSense built on Google's AdScape Media acquisition that allows advertisers and content producers to place ads within the content of online games.

But, that's a familiar position for Google.

The service, currently in beta, offers a variety of traditional AdSense ad units:

"As a beta user of AdSense for Games, you can display video ads, image ads, or text ads within your online games to earn revenue. You'll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over."

What's more, there are already a number of well-known companies participating, like Konami, mochimedia, and Zynga, which took on an additional $29 million in funding in July. Titles highlighted include Dance Dance Revolution, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Karaoke Revolution to name a few.

But just how well integrated are the ads? Google has provided the following demonstration of the service in action:

Content providers who are interested in participating in the program may apply if they have a minimum of 500,000 game plays with 80% of their traffic from the U.S. or the U.K.

Entering a market where Yahoo! and Microsoft already have a firm foothold is not out of character for Google. Nor is succeeding with that strategy. Clearly, it's a position from which they've managed to win, time and time again. It will be interesting to see if Google's series of come-from-behind victories remains consistent in the world of online gaming.

Google also said that the ads could be integrated into their new Mapplets map mashup making service on a revenue sharing basis. Users would be paid by the click, similar to the current Adsense offerings, and could limit the number of sponsor ads that would appear in their Mapplets or turn them off completely. "This is something you will completely control," said Google engineer Andrew Eland at Google's Developer Day in London yesterday.

Google's preview Mapplets might give a hint of how the service could work. Two of Google's example Mapplets are commerce-oriented: movie showtimes and real estate search. It is easy to see how Google could offer company's paid preferential treatment on this type of maps mashup. These paid placements would not necessarily resemble current Adsense text ads, but could be more fluidly integrated into the look and feel of Google Maps.

Like other Adwords ads, map ads could be highly targeted, not only by subject matter or keyword, but also by location.

Today, Google announced that it is rebranding DoubClick's Performics Affiliate as the Google Affiliate Network.  Google acquired DoubleClick in March 2008 for $3.1 Billion. The Google Affiliate Network is not yet integrated into Google's AdSense and will continue to be hosted at ConnectCommerce.com for the time being. Companies currently featured on the network include Target, Kohls.com, Citibank, Circuit City, Zazzle, Bank of America, Verizon, and Barnes & Noble.

Google is clearly trying to expand its advertising portfolio both for publishers and advertisers. Chances are that Google will integrate the Affiliate network into AdSense in the long run. Given the synergies between the two, it does seem strange, though, that Google would not be doing this already. But then, Google does often seem to take a rather long time to integrate its acquisitions (just think GrandCentral of Jaiku).

Google is only slowly opening up the Affiliate Network to new publishers. Those interested in signing up are currently being forwarded to an application form.

Analyst Frost & Sullivan predicts that the mobile advertising market will reach $2.12 billion in the US by 2011. Worldwide, the outlook is even rosier: $10 billion per year by 2010 says the Shoesteck Group, while EJL Wireless Research estimates a $9.5 billion yearly global mobile ad market by 2011.

The thirteen countries that will see the initial roll-out of AdSense for Mobile in the next few weeks are the United States, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan.

Google's AdSense for Mobile comes in two formats: single and double. Google's AdSense publisher terms don't appear to have been updated, so theoretically, mobile publishers could place up to 3 ad units on their content (i.e., up to 6 ads). I wonder whether text ads will have the same sort of success on the mobile web that they have had on the general Internet. Clicking on links often requires more work on the mobile web and screen real estate is so limited that ads might be seen as more invasive.

Also making mobile ad news yesterday was Nokia, who acquired Enpocket, a Boston-based mobile ad provider. Red Herring looks at Nokia's purchase as a reflection of the company's announcement last month to transform itself into a software and services company.

The AP offers auto websites selecting topical videos from YouTube about cars to run along with AdSense banner ads on their sites. If the report is correct, there's a whole lot of potential here. Though cynics have said that there's little hope for video outside YouTube, small video ad networks insist that there's a growing, thriving ecosystem of niche video sites just waiting for more and better content and ads.

Monetization of YouTube has always been the big question since Google Acquired the site. While other video hosting companies sought content first and then tried to build out their ad networks, it's only logical that the biggest online ad network in the world would fold the best content from the biggest video site in the world into its offerings. For more industry background see Liz Gannes's post at NewTeeVee.

Ads have been run along side a very select few user channels on the YouTube site for a handful of months but these reports indicate that the program will be made much wider and be taken off of the site all around the web. Google has run very limited video advertising already but nothing like what it could do with YouTube's huge catalog. The ads will be persistent banners outside the frame and fading in-frame overlays.

It's a simple story, but if it is true it is going to blow the world of online video and advertising wide open.

For the time being, these ads are only available in the U.S. and in English, though Google plans to launch them in other regions and languages as well.

Google has obviously struggled to turn YouTube into a profitable business unit. Taking YouTube ads out of the YouTube silo could help Google to win over more advertisers and give current advertisers more reasons to buy ads on YouTube.

Revenue Split

As our sister blog Last 100 reports, the revenue generated by these videos will be split between MacFarlane, Google, the host of the site the video is playing on, and Media Rights, the production company behind these cartoons.

New Hope For AdSense Video?

AdSense has been giving publishers the option to run YouTube videos with advertising on their sites since last October, but it doesn't seem as if publishers really ever warmed up to the idea of having relatively random YouTube videos show up on their sites. Also, revenue from these videos tends to be low.

With this new series, some publishers might reconsider running these ads, especially if their audience is compatible with MacFarlane's brand of humor.

In a presentation up on the mini-site, which we've embedded below, Google states that one of the benefits of this arrangement is that "Yahoo! remains a vibrant and innovative presence on the Internet". Which is putting Yahoo!'s position rather bluntly. The crux of the deal though is that Yahoo! will be able to better monetize the 'long tail' of their search, using Google's near invincible Adsense.

* This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.
* Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.
* The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

That the deal will strengthen Yahoo! is, unfortunately for Yahoo!, not the contentious point of this arrangement. Indeed we at ReadWriteWeb have first hand experience of why Yahoo! needs this deal. We recently switched back from Yahoo Publisher Network (their attempt at an Adsense alternative) back to Adsense, precisely because the YPN long tail results were so poor. It's no coincidence that our CPC ads, which display as a backup to our CPM ads, have gotten much more relevant and contextual since we switched back. Unfortunately that told us a lot about the state of YPN.

Let's be frank, Google has got Yahoo by the short and curlies with this deal - and the presentation below isn't afraid to give it another twist.

The contentious part of the deal is whether it gives Google a dominant position in the online advertising industry, and therefore will it be bad for consumers and competitors (specifically Microsoft). The closest the mini-site comes to addressing this is slide 10, which has a list of things that the deal is apparently not:

What the deal is NOT

* Not a merger
* Does not remove a competitor from the playing field
* Does not prevent Yahoo! from making similar deals with others
* Does not increase Google's share of search traffic
* Does not let Google set prices for advertisers
* Does not give Google any equity stake in Yahoo!

It remains to be seen whether American antitrust authorities are convinced by these arguments, or not.

Another point of contention is that Google, once again, makes no mention of the percentage of ad revenue they take. In other words: if there is not enough competition in the market for Adsense, then publishers could end up getting a lower share of the revenue from Adsense as a result. Which is a valid concern for publishers and not one that the slideshow addresses adequately.

One interesting side-benefit of the deal is that it will also enable interoperability between Yahoo IM and Google Talk. This benefits Google more than Yahoo, given that Yahoo is one of the market leaders in IM and Google is not.

Here is the full presentation. Let us know in the comments what you think:

As a part of the announcement FeedBurner offers information for publishers about how to migrate from FeedBurner to a new Google account, as in the future all feed related services will require a Google account. It's the end of an era, really.

Still, for everything from analytics, to nice clean easily transferable URLs and accounts, to email subscriptions and adding links into the body of feeds - FeedBurner has been great.

Now it appears to be subsumed by AdSense. Maybe that will mean it will get more attention and updates than it has since the acquisition. Maybe that will mean there are more ads in feeds. Either way, just as so much of the art and communication world now lives in the shadow of advertising and PR, it's sad to see feed publishing now wholly under the umbrella of Google's massive advertising business.

Photo: "Spreading the FeedBurner love," CC by Flickr user 37hz

YouTube is Google's second most popular product after search. When Google introduced contextual text ads to monetize search results in 2000, just a few years later (in 2003) they took the next step by bringing those text ads to the long tail of the web and gave publishers of all sizes the ability to monetize their content. The service, called AdSense, has been a huge moneymaker for Google and helped solidify them as the leader in text advertising. So that got me thinking: can AdSense for video be very far away?

Oddly, Google has chosen a CPM model (a flat fee of $20 per 1000 video impressions) rather than their bread and butter cost per click model for the YouTube ads. Extrapolating from stats seen on his network, LiveRail CEO Mark Trefgarne estimates that Google could see a click-thru rate of 4-5%, which would lead to about a $0.45 per ad view rate on average. "Google must believe that advertisers will prefer the predictability of a flat CPM basis for total spend but uncertain cost per view, rather than a less certain total spend, but very predictable cost per view," theorizes Trefgarne on his blog.

But as YouTube clearly demonstrates, user generated video content is on the rise. According to eMarketer, there will be nearly 238 million creators of user generated content worldwide by 2011. As small businesses take matters into their own hands and become more comfortable with video advertising, the way they have become comfortable with managing their own ad campaigns on AdWords and AdSense, a CPC model for YouTube's video ads could certainly be palatable for advertisers. Granted, creating video ads is not as simple as creating text ads, but YouTube proves that 1. amateur videos can be entertaining/worthwhile and 2. people are more than willing to make and watch them.

I think that an AdSense for video is an inevitable future. Google can offer two things to advertisers: a huge pre-built distribution network (via YouTube), and sophisticated bidding and campaign tracking tools (via AdSense). For publishers, Google can offer a sophisticated monetization strategy, and they can also offer hosting (though they need to offer a non-gallery option -- i.e., videos that are hosted by YouTube, but not displayed on YouTube.com).

I asked Mark Trefgarne for this thoughts this morning on YouTube's advertising, and the potential of a Google AdSense for video in the future. Trefgarne wasn't overly concerned by Google saying that he thinks the market can support more than one video ad network operating in different niches.

"Although Google will no doubt corner the monetization of user generated content thanks to their control of YouTube, that same card will hinder their ability to work with premium content publishers. Google have made a strong commitment to YouTube, but its video-gallery model necessitates near total copyright hand-over; as a result most serious content producers are afraid to go near it."

He disagreed with me that Google's entry into the long tail of video advertising is inevitable. "I don't think its coming anytime soon," he told me. But Trefgarne was ultimately energized by Google's video ad product. "Google will have an enormous impact, and will be the biggest player for some time to come," he told me, "but from our perspective their entry simply re-emphasizes the importance of this market, and further legitimizes our model."

What do you think of Google's new video ads? Do you think they should expand their offering to third-party publishers and create an AdSense for video? Will they? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.