A big stir was created when Google stepped into the video advertising realm last May, and Google's AdSense service began to offer video ads as an opt-in to part of their click-to-play service. The search engine took video content from large advertisers, such as Warner Music Group and Sony, and began to offer them on their network of advertising sites. Obviously, this provoked great concern from the backbenchers in the advertising world when valuable real-estate began to shift away from TV and onto the internet as they began to explode onto blogs, forums and portals. Video advertising had suddenly found a home on the internet, initiated and operated by Google.
The next big commotion occured when Google acquired YouTube in October last year. YouTube was founded in Feburary 2005 and was based on flash to display video. Within months, the amount of amateur content began to snowball, deeming YouTube the most popular outlet for alternative entertainment online.
In 2006, Google acquired the company for $1.6 billion; the great concern at this stage was the vast copyright issue that would soon develop over the amount of copyrighted material that was being forced into the public domain. However, what actually happened was that YouTube gained popularity and even became seen as somewhat legitimate as more politicians and big business began to use the site - something that has yet to happen on such a large scale to the equally popular social networking site, myspace.com.
As a result, there's a natural connection forming between the need to serve AdSense video ads and owning the largest and best known video hosting and video distribution site on the net. Nevertheless, Google say they will remain separate and independent, focusing on Google while YouTube moves along as YouTube.
However, a Google Video search currently yields YouTube results. For example, if you searched for the term "SEO" on Google Video, you would return results for a video from the mighty Matt Cutts discussing some of the myths that appear around search engine optimisation. But what appears just below is a YouTube video helping build myths about search engine optimisation. Does this imply a crossing of lines between Google and YouTube? In some senses, it does: but is it an implication that the two will continue to blend? Not necessarily - and, if Google can help it, perhaps not at all.
