New YouTube Video Units Now Live For US Publishers

Google has rolled out the highly anticipated YouTube Video Unit for Google Adsense, a system they have been testing with select beta testers since May of this year. The new player sports a newly designed interface with configurable color schemes allowing you to blend the new video ad units into your site better. Other differences include an ad banner above the main video display. Below the main player is a link to the video’s director page. This page allows you to see other videos from the director, comment on their videos, as well as communicate with the video director.

Ad Overlay
The biggest difference this new player offers of course, are the new ad overlays that show up 10 seconds into the video. These non intrusive ads appear on a semi-transparent background at the bottom of the video. After about 10 seconds or so, the player will load another related advertisement. The viewer also has the option of scrolling to the next related ad but I really don’t see anyone using that feature. The ads can also be totally hidden away if a viewer were to find them annoying.

No Video Units for me yet!
These new video units look very promising, but I wont be adding them to my sites yet because of one big problem. Google isn’t releasing it to webmasters or bloggers outside of the USA for now. The first phase is limited to english language publishers located in the US. I can’t wait to be able to test out the new ad units here on the blog and of course on my car forums.