When it comes to Google and video, most people probably think about YouTube or Google Video and the struggles that have been going on with Viacom pulling its content and the deal with CBS falling through, etc. (which I wrote about recently). But as a story in the New York Times reminds us this morning, there is another whole side to the Google video story, and that is the advertising side, where Google is moving to expand a trial project.
According to the NYT story, Google has signed on Dow Jones Co., CondeNast and others as partners for its video ad trial, which runs video content in Google ad space on websites — complete with post-roll ads — and then shares the revenue with the site owner and the content provider. As Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy points out, this is much closer to Google’s “core competency” (as the business types like to say) than streaming clips from The Colbert Report on YouTube. And as PaidContent notes, it is an extension of a trial that started last year and was then expanded earlier this year.
There is obviously a lot of jockeying for position going on here. As the NYT story makes clear, one of the stumbling blocks is that the content providers — such as the Wall Street Journal, MTV and so on — want to maintain control over not just the content but the relationship with the advertiser as well. Although they seem open to experimentation, there is bound to be friction as Google inserts itself into that process.