Earning revenue from YouTube videos just got easier

UPDATE: The video units feature has been retired -- however, you may wish to review the other revenue opportunities available for video content owners.

We'd like to let you know about two recent improvements to video units that make them more easy and appealing to place on your sites. First, we've partnered with some new content providers that we'd like to highlight. These partners have signed on to let AdSense publishers embed their videos and share in the ad revenue.

• Broadbandtv: "Broadbandtv is partnering with YouTube to bring the very best video program lineup to a growing and engaged online audience. Broadbandtv shows include hits from Fashion, Celebrity News, Sports, Technology, Comedy and Travel to top notch Spanish-language TV series like Somos Tu y Yo."
  
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: "CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada's national public broadcaster and one of its largest cultural institutions. CBC/Radio-Canada is available how, where, and when Canadians want it."
  
• The Orchard: "A global leader in digital music, video, new media and brand services, The Orchard offers family content like Gumby, Mr. Bill, My Favorite Martian, and other categories of content like music and comedy."
  

To give you a better idea of the videos that are available for syndication to your site, we've also created a gallery of some featured video units content partners. Note that to choose any of these content providers for your video unit, you should get their YouTube username by visiting their YouTube channel, and then put this username into the "Channel" field when choosing content for your unit.

Second, we're happy to announce that video units now support 728x90 and 160x600 formats to more easily fit into your site. These two new formats will feature five video thumbnails - when a user clicks on one of the thumbnails, a full sized video unit will appear, along with accompanying ads:

728x90 video unit


728x90 video unit, expanded


160x600 video unit, expanded



You'll generate earnings for valid clicks or impressions on the ads which appear. To use the new formats, you'll need to create new video units by visiting your AdSense Setup tab. To choose the new content for your video units, you can edit any of your players or set up new video units dedicated to this new content. Please keep in mind that video units are currently only supported for English or Japanese-language accounts in the following regions:

Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States

Finally, if you haven't edited or made a new video unit recently, you may not have noticed that you can now preview the kinds of video that will show up in the unit, based on the filtering choices you've made. We heard that you wanted more insight into the types of content that would display, and we think this will help.

While you can use video units like any other ad, they're also a great addition to the content of your page. So we encourage you to use video units as you may have used embedded YouTube videos in the past - to add variety and interest for your users.

Thanks for all the feedback that's helping us to make video units more useful to you. If you have more thoughts to share, please leave us a comment.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing