Video Revenue Sharing Schemes: Google AdSense vs. Blinkx AdHoc
Play the video + ad, and get some share of the ad revenue
There have been recently two important market moves regarding (more or less) contextually targeted video ad revenue share schemes. One step taken by Google offering web site owners to have YouTube video boxes on the site and get money for advertisements running in the videos. The other step came from blinkx immediately: OK, let’s give site owners money, but for all kinds of videos, and at a fixed CPC price. Here’s a short overview of the two schemes.
Adboxes with various video streaming
Greg Sterling at Searchengineland, (the central search tech + marketing + policy blog) has pointed out that “On the heels of yesterday’s Google AdSense video announcement, video search engine Blinkx has announced advertising for video using its “AdHoc” contextual ad platform. The difference is that the AdHoc contextual ad widget works with other video players embedded in third-party sites.”
In other words, it’s not just YouTube or YouTube partners. But sites like MySpace, GoogleVideo, YouTube, Revver, Metacafe, Veoh, DailyMotion, Break, FunnyOrDie, CollegeHumor, or what you ask for in an email from blinkx.
It is truly a major difference not to limit the video library to YouTube. But there are some more. The other major difference is the percentages of ad revenue sharing: as a publisher you know exactly that Blinkx is giving you 50% of the revenue: “Our clever technology matches relevant, in-video text ads to any video. Whenever someone clicks on an ad in your video, you make half the cash!” (oh boy, I hear the Clickfraud shrieks getting louder)
Whereas Google AdSense has always been a guessing game, even up to 75-78% of the ad revenue may be given back to publishers. Even if the revenue level is not constantly over 70% it is still generous. What is your experience about that?
Geographical boundaries
AdSense: “Currently this feature is open only to publishers located in the United States with English-language websites.” Can Blinkx make an advance on this? It sounds they can. All they require is a PayPal account.
What do I need to register?
Very, very little. Just select a username and password to create an account and give us your PayPal username (usually an email address). You must have a PayPal account because that’s how we’ll pay you once you start making money. You can register for a PayPal account at http://www.paypal.com.
Types of ads
In Google AdSense we are basically talking about two types of ad formats: so called companion ads, which are above the video content within the player (text or image), and text overlay ads, which are at the bottom 20% of the video content area. CPC or CPM based. On the other hand Blinkx is only running text ads (”We require a title, a description (both shown on the ad) and a target URL … In the future we will potentially introduce graphical banners and video formats too.). The price is CPC, and the cost is fixed at 5 cents.
Testing for video revenues
Now all you need to figure out is what tactics you should experiment with and in what combination: are you better off if you get 50%, maybe 75% for a click (not impression) on the ad in blinkx AdHoc or Google AdSense, respectively? What further options are there you think are worth considering? Let me know what the contextual video ad campaigns tell you.
I’ve tried using Blinkx Ad-Hoc and its not bad. The best thing about it is that it’s super easy to get the ads. The time from registration to getting the ad code is incredibly short.
This Blinkx is ok, but the problem is that you need to have thousands of video views to get any respectable revenue.
And this mean that you should have a somekind of videosharing site with a lot of videos to earn something. With just a blog is almost impossible…..
Thanks