Google Blasts out the Video Ads

We'll begin seeing a lot more video ads on our favorite sites soon. By Christmas they will be almost everywhere we go online.

Google has just introduced their astounding new video advertising arsenal. In the same space where you now see text or image ads, you will soon be seeing videos.

About a year ago, when Google started talking to the big Madison Avenue ad agencies, everyone was guessing they would begin competing in the placement of TV ads for their clients. These speculations were headed up the wrong tree. The Internet is the only future of TV and this video push will finally make that clear to everyone.

Google is starting the video campaign with only a handful of high profile advertisers. The key beta partner is Saturn, a division of General Motors. If you happen to live in one of the cities where this is being geographically tested, you will see Saturn video ads if you are searching for a keyword that is even remotely related to making a new car purchase.

You can try this out now, if you live in Buffalo, Dallas, Harrisburg, Indianopolis, Las Vegas or Raleigh. The ad zooms you from a view of the earth and flies you directly into your local Saturn dealership where the general manager introduces himself and gives you a tour of the new car.

You can bet the Madison Avenue agencies are drooling about the prospects. For all the Fortune 500 companies who continue to dedicate most of their ad budget to tv and newspapers we can expect to see a major migration given the very sophisticated and targetted video options now available to them.

Basic video banner ads have been around for a while. But they haven't been based on a contextual, keyword search system. The new contextually and geographically unique Google ads are about to revolutionize the advertising industry once again.


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Art by Christina Qualiana

Us Magazine switches to Drupal

One of the largest gossip sites has just done a major design overhaul and has switched to Drupal.

Us Magazine, second in circulation only to People Magazine, has got a rapidly growing audience online. They seem to understand the current blogging zeitgeist more than People Magazine does. And they've just revamped their online presence. Their website has switched to the Drupal platform. As with many other large corporate sites, they are finding that the open-source Drupal model is much more flexible and desirable.

But it's not patently obvious that they are with Drupal, and they don't note it anywhere on their site. But there is a trick to know if any website is powered by Drupal. When you go to any individual post, such as this one, you will see the word 'node' in the URL. This gives it away as a Drupal site.

Drupal is free and open source. It's available as a blogging platform for all small bloggers as well as the large corporate sites. But you need to have some programming savvy to be able to set it up.

Blogging for a Living

There's a good article in Business 2.0 this month about how some people are sitting in their homes making fortunes from the advertising revenues on their blogs. They note that CPM rates are rising rapidly for top-tier bloggers and are now at about $8 dollars for every thousand page views. At the beginning of this year, the average CPM was only about $4 dollars.

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The above image is Fortune's Wheel by Katia.