The Marketing Punk Blog

I was doing some, ahem, research on YouTube and ran across the first YouTube overlay advertisement that I’ve seen. From the picture below you can see that the advertisement ran near the start of the video (15 seconds in), and was and ad for something YouTube and HP are doing together.

I thought it was interesting that an orangey-yellow marker appears on the progress bar at the point where the ad started. I guess that is in case you want to get back to the ad? I didn’t click on the ad, but from what I understand doing so would have overlayed a video player on top of the window playing the original video – (see an example in the SEL post). The really cool thing is that the advertiser is only charged if there is a click on the overlay ad.

Overall, I’d say that if you are going to try to make some money on videos without being annoying about it, this is the best way to do it, so kudos to Google. I know if YouTube suddenly had a bunch of pre-roll ads running before videos, I’d be looking for a new place to do my…um, researching.

The big question for me is - when will search marketers be able to start placing these ads on a broad scale, and will there be help with the creation of the flash ads?

Get the low down on YouTube overlay ads from Search Engine Land in this article.

And if you haven’t seen it yet (and you are a Star Wars fan), you might want to check out some episodes of Chad Vader…it’s classic stuff.

(via InsureMe Affiliate Blog)