Google Closes Book On AdSense Video Units

According to a recent Adsense Blog post by Arlene Lee Google will be ending the video unit project. If you're not familiar with video units they allowed you to display YouTube content on your site and make money off of them. They stated that it "hasn't had the impact we had hoped for." I guess one might translate that into either not enough interest or not enough revenue generated. So it will end as of the end of April.

This is not the end of displaying YouTube content on other websites, that's still available through the embed code. This was an AdSense-specific program. Personally I never found it all that good as it was too difficult to find appropriate content to display.

The blog post goes on to say that this won't affect the availability of other video-related ads options -- video ads may appear in your AdSense for content ad units if you've opted into image ads, and AdSense for video is still accepting applications from eligible publishers who produce video content.

No further publishers will be accepted into the video units program and it will end altogether at the end of April.

Once video units are retired at the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won't generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

Perhaps they will find a better way to monetize this content for those of us who would like to continue to do so. Somehow I think that won't happen in the near future.

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