If you’re an advertiser with Google Adsense, you’ve probably been receiving a few emails over the last week or so in regards to Adsense video units being retired at the end of April. According to Google:
“…we’ve decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites”
If you’re not familiar with Google Video Units, I’m not surprised. Google even admits that these ads have not been performing well, which is the main reason for their retirement, and I have rarely seen these being used on any other sites. In fact, I cannot think of another site I’ve ever seen using these.
Basically a Google Video Unit is an ad that looks similar to a regular video. It’s content is meant to match up with the content on your blog, so for example if you had a blog about mac products, you could set your video unit to display mac related content.
Anyway, my main reason for writing this was to share my brief experience with Video Units. I have a site getting betweeen 1000 – 3000 unique visits per day. The topic is technology related, and the content is 90% videos. I thought that video units would be a perfect match for this site. I placed the video unit on the single.php template in my WP theme under the main post content, so basically the video units will only display on the post pages – not on the home page or any other pages, and layout wise, the page will have the main video, followed by the video unit below.
I thought this would be a pretty clever layout since it’s common for visitors to finish the video they originally came to your site to see, then check out the next video below. Here’s the basic breakdown of about 9 months of this:
Overall, considering the amount of page impressions, this is obviously a terrible result. Thankfully I only used it on one site. Generally if you get that many page impressions on a regular video blog your earnings should be a LOT higher than that – and I know this for a fact.
So hopefully now that Google is going to be focusing their efforts on better ways for publisher to monitize their sites, they will come up with a more creative way to mix video and contextual advertising. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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Tags: adsense video units, google video units, retiring google video units, video units
Hi Sam,
peter here from the trailer site you helped me with the other day.
I got a question. How do I add new pages with video and articles?
I have my S2P set on post on my blog page. I just want to add content
pages to the site and don’t care if they show up on my sidebar. I just
want the seo spider bait and updating for the search engines.
If I go into ‘page’ and click on add new then won’t that put it on
my upper nav. bar?
thanks,
Peter
Hey Peter
Great question. By default, any new pages you make will be added to the top nav bar. For something like this where you have pages you don’t want to appear in the nav bar, you’ll need to do a little work in the template to define which links actually appear there. You can check out this post: http://www.wpcontempo.com/how-to-dicatate-which-pages-are-displayed-in-the-navigation-bar-on-your-wordpress-theme/, which should give you a pretty good idea of how to accomplish this.
Actually I think what I would like to do is add a page for videos and articles and each of those pages would link to the different videos and articles?
also is there a way to add a datafeed, or advertisement below the “hot buy” section on the left. Or if you wanted to advertise a book from clickbank or amazon?
thanks,
peter
Ok what I would do then is create the videos and articles pages and leave them in the top menu if you’ve got room. Then for the pages within those pages, just define Articles as the parent page for your article sub pages, and so on. This will keep all the sub pages out of the main nav naturally.
For the Hot Buy section, it is a widgetized sidebar, so you can add anything you want there in addition to or instead of the PHPBay sidebar widget. You can just add a text widget to that sidebar and paste in your affiliate code.
Hi Sam,
I have 2 plug-ins that are not showing up on my plug-ins page.
One is s2P and the other is a sitemap generator. Do you know
why these two are not showing up even though they are working?
thanks
Peter
Can you for sure tell they are working? If they’re working, it probably doesn’t matter that much if they’re showing up on your plugins page or not. If they aren’t working, delete them from your plugins folder on your remote server. Then download fresh copies of each plugin and reupload. One reason a plugin wouldn’t show up is that it hasn’t been uploaded correctly.