New York — In its relentless effort to turn YouTube into a money-making center, Google is every bit as eager as Hulu or Tremor for luring brand advertisers to embrace online video to pump in more advertising dollars into its coffer. To make that materialize, YouTube on Tuesday announced the availability of a new product for media shops and advertisers with tight creative resources, an extension of its Display Ad Builder tool called InVideo, which allows users to build animated overlays that appear at the bottom of videos.
The search giant is now automating the way that Flash overlay ads can be created and displayed on YouTube videos. Through the self-serve Display Ad Builder in Google AdWords, a Google ad construction platform used by over 20,000 advertisers, allows mom-and-pop businesses with little to no experience to quickly and easily edit templates and fonts to create display banner ads and place them in YouTube videos.
Overlay ads have been existing for a long time on YouTube and other video networks. Now, Display Ad Builder includes all the tools necessary to construct overlay ads, those little banners that appear on the bottom of a video, have for awhile been one of the most effective ad formats on many video sites, including YouTube.
InVideo ads in an animated banner makes it simple for advertisers to build simple overlays for campaigns of any size. They normally popup part way through a selected video and disappear after a number of seconds if the ad is not clicked. YouTube says the ad format — is the most effective format on YouTube and can be bought on a cost-per-click basis or on a CPM basis, with average click-through rates eight to ten times higher than normal display ads, the company said.
“With this new format, Display Ad Builder will empower more advertisers to execute display advertising campaigns on YouTube,” writes Product Manager Christian Oestlien. “For example, if you are a small business that sells beauty products, you can quickly use a template in Display Ad Builder in AdWords to create an overlay ad and then run it on popular fashion and beauty videos.”
The new templates empowers advertisers to develop basic overlay ads and companion banners. These will appear mainly on YouTube, but can also be associated with videos in the Google Content Network. Ads are targeted based on various content criteria, including video-by-video placement; advertisers decide whether they want to bid on a cost-per-click or CPM basis.
Either way, advertisers can choose to place the ads they build on a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) basis according to demographics, content categories or even placed at a video-by-video level. The ads appear for several seconds part way through a video and fade away if they are not clicked on.
In one example, a company called Cinemin — a creator of mini multimedia projectors — has employed InVideo ads to target movie and media-related content.
Google launched its display ad builder in 2008. Since then, the AdWords tool has been used by some 40,000 advertisers — half of whom are actively using it today. Over 80 percent of those businesses had never run a display ad campaign with Google before.
YouTube regularly tweaks the types of overlay ads it shows, since last October, the video-sharing hub has shown ads on more than one billion videos a week, which was approximately one in seven videos. YouTube wants to open up all of its video resource to advertisers large and small.
Google’s move is an illustration of the patience the company has had with the property, building video views to more than a billion a day while allowing revenue flow to percolate quietly, with a variety of tools from pre- and post-roll ads to overlays and banners. At least one analyst, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup, forecasts YouTube will generate more than $1 billion in revenue for Google by 2011, with it coming in with revenues of $945 million this year.
Today’s release is the latest move in that direction.