GigaOM
writes about the lack of ads for Audio/Video by Google. They are the king of ads for text but nothing has really developed in the so called "rich media" environment of audio/podcasts and video clips(henceforth to be called media). Many companies seem to be focusing on writing software to recognise speech, fingerprint videos, and a whole host of other adsense for rich media programs.
However, I disagree with this approach. Sure you may get some extra information from the video or audio file that you eventually will watch when you visit the site, but you have to ask yourself how often do I blindly visit a site knowing nothing about what is contained in the file and then go forth and consume the media? Very unlikely right! Well that's because we generally infer things from our environment or context. We know the gist of what is going to be contained in the media before actually view it due not only to how we find it but the context around the content.
YouTube is probably a very easy place to advertise on. The best thing about YouTube as many have written about is not the technology, it is the community. In a paper for a module last year I wrote about how a company in this day and age needs to add value to their site to bring people back without making them jump through hoops. I talked about eBuyer as a classic example of a site that does this. Their excellent rating and review system that in some respect dictates the health of a product is both a convincer to buy the item and also a source of after sales assistance for technical problems. YouTube also adds value to their videos.
The community of YouTube have not only tagged/labelled the videos very well but also the comments beneath the videos are excellent for inferring a context. Get someone to load a random popular video and just show you the comments and you'll find that it is more or less a few key phrases that will have you understanding the content of the video straight away.
Therefore, Google can easily use all of this information to build up a map of how to base their current text based adsense on a site that just contains tags, names of videos, categorisation and comments. Furthermore, Google can use the videos on YouTube to try and create a relationship map between videos, people, categories and link all these to video and text adverts.
For example, there are many sports based clips on YouTube that are very easy to target. Now the word football has different meanings depending on which sport we are talking about. Google would use all of the surrounding contextual info such as the title of the video which invariably contains a team name or the comments that will have player names or different score systems to infer what type of sport is being talked about. Then they can easily link to text based stories on the web such as Newspapers, TV channels that show sports, and perhaps even a sponsored video paid for by someone like Sky for example to showcase their legit service on their site.
The trick is to vary ads as much as possible so users notice them, however, without forcing the issue that it becomes an annoyance.
