AdMoolah News and Views

I hadn’t seen this mentioned anywhere before (maybe I just missed it), but it looks like you can now select specific videos when setting up AdSense Video. I know this is something a lot of publishers have been asking for.

It seems like you can’t pick any video at all from YouTube, it has to be in the list of providers that they supply. This is a fairly limited list, but at least it’s a start.

There is a help page in AdSense entitled “How do I choose individual videos to play in my video units?” that gives complete instructions on how to do it. It is a little clunky right now, you have to search for the name of the provider you are interested in, find a video you are interested in and then add the name of the video to the “hints” section of the Video Ad Unit setup.

I haven’t tried this out myself yet, let me know if you have success with it.

YPN has announced a partnership with Adobe that will allow publishers to put ads in PDF files.

Publishers will be able to upload PDFs to Yahoo, and the ads will be inserted. Publishers can than email the PDFs or put them on websites. The ads will be contextual and will be displayed to the right of the content.

This is an interesting new way to display. E-Book authors have often released free e-books with affiliate links in the as a way to make money, but this allows one more monetization option. One problem I see with the ads is they are not integrated into the content area of the PDFs, so I think the Click-through-rates will be terrible.

If you are interested, you can apply for the beta. It doesn’t look like you have to have a current YPN account to apply, but like the YPN beta, only US publishers will be accepted.