Google Adsense for Video now in Beta
February 21, 2008
Google have today announced the release of Adsense for Video
In a very short time, watching videos online has become a common pastime, and the imagination of artists and other content owners continues to fuel this trend. Meanwhile, across the industry, advertisers and video publishers continue to look for the best solution that balances the needs of video fans with the need for video sites to generate the revenue that enables them to continue to be creative as they grow.
We have two major goals: to make it easier for publishers to monetise video online, and for advertisers to learn how to reach the video community. Towards these ends, today we’re also launching a single destination with an overview of various options to expand online video opportunities called Google Video Advertising Solutions. We hope this will be your starting point to understand how to leverage the Google Content Network and YouTube to make the most out of the online video experience. You can also see our overview videos for advertisers and publishers — because isn’t video the best way to experience video?
Google have been working with a number of video partners such as ehow, expertvillage as well as social video aggregators such as Revver, blip.tv and GodTube.
There are some criteria that publishers have to meet to participate in AdSense for video, which you can learn about on the Inside AdSense blog.
Google Ads being Hijacked
December 19, 2007
A new Trojan that replaces Google text ads with ads from different providers has been spotted by BitDefender.
This malware uses the “hosts” file (located in the “%WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc” directory) to redirect the initial query to the Google Adsense servers to a malicious host. This file is used as a first step in the name / IP translation process and if an entry is located in this file, the domain name server is not queried. The malware creates an entry redirecting pagead2.googlesyndication.com to a rogue server.
This server, rather than displaying advertisements from Google, display advertisements from a third party services. This damages both users (because the advertisements and/or the linked sites may contain malicious code - a very likely situation, given that they are promoted using malware in the first place) and webmasters (because they take away viewers and thus possible money sources from their websites).
To check if you are affected, you should issue the following command (from the command line or from Start -> Run):
ping -t pagead2.googlesyndication.com
The response should look similar to this:
Pinging pagead.l.google.com [6x.xxx.xxx.xxx] with 32 bytes of data:
where the x’s represent digits. If you are not infected, the first digit will be a 6 (as in the example). If you are infected, the first digit will be a 9.
