Google to Begin In-Game Ads, YouTube to Place Ads for Games

Wed, Oct 8, 2008

It's important that you know what products and services are right for your hip, on-the-go lifestyle. Did you know there are still several hours in your day when nobody is attempting to sell you anything? It's criminal, and we shouldn't stand for it. Thankfully, Google and YouTube are both starting new ventures to ensure your least productive moments are still great for the economy. VentureBeat is reporting (via ShackNews) that Google is going forward with a public beta of AdSense for Games, a dynamically-generated system that will allow advertisers to place their material in flash games. When you're done gaming, though, and have moved on to watching some high-quality video entertainment on YouTube, don't fret -- YouTube has announced a plan to start experimenting with some new advertisement programs as well. According to a report on Reuters, soon YouTube will be working with third-party retailers to sell things like movies, music, and games. So, naturally, once you see an ad for games, your short attention span (honed by hours upon hours of 10-second YouTube clips) will drive you back to play more flash games, wherein you will see more ads. It's a beautiful, perfect circle of commerce.

The AdSense for Games website goes into some detail about how the new ads will work. Google has promised marketers that their ads can be included "before, within, between, or after game play." We've already seen ideas like this at work; roughly one out of every three flash games you can play these days will feature an ad while it's loading. AdSense, however, sounds like it offers far more opportunity for ad appearances. Furthermore, according to the VentureBeat report, it sounds like the ads will be very easy for developers to integrate, allowing for good game design to dictate the proper moments for ads to show up. VentureBeat writes, in a conversation with a Google representative, that "developers of games can use Flash software development kits to designate the points in a game that make an 'ad request.'"

This sounds very familiar. Kongregate offers something similar in its downloadable API, to allow developers to designate in-game moments that are suitable for achievements or high scores. The site encourages game designers to send out data points, signalling that a player has completed the game or defeated a certain number of enemies, at which point the host site knows to update the player's profile and trigger the "achievement" event. It would be a fairly simple matter to change or add such data points to things like "Insert Pre-Game ad," or "Insert Interstitial Ad" at an appropriate moment, say, after a level has been cleared, or between game rounds.

If I were a programmer, I'd probably be a jerk about it, and make you watch a video for health care every time an enemy hit you. The enticing part is, though, that such ideas can be made possible with a developer-controlled system like AdSense. Google promises that publishers can pick and choose their advertisers to ensure the ads stay relevant, and with the ability to place them at appropriate times, hopefully we'll soon see games from crafty creators who know how not to annoy their players.

Google already has quite a few developers on board, including big names like Konami, who have announced that they will be using AdSense in upcoming flash versions of Track and Field, Dance Dance Revolution, and Frogger. It certainly lends some weight to the program, but I'm honestly more curious about the inclusion of Armor Games in Google's participant roster. Armor Games is an extremely prolific producer of Flash game content, and there's an extremely good chance you've played one or more of their titles. If you've ever ground achievements on Kongregate, you know what this might mean to the number of ads you see.

YouTube, on the other hand, has not yet decided how they will be implementing ads into their content. According to the Reuters report, YouTube will be partnering with Amazon and iTunes; a viewer who watches a music video, for example, will be provided with a link where they can buy the song via either retailer. Users who subsequently buy the song will see some of their money shared with YouTube, which may lead to a significant boost in revenue for the video site -- which was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

As part and parcel of the deal, YouTube will also be sending viewers to Amazon to buy video games. The Reuters report calls out Spore as a specific example, but doesn't say more than that. We assume viewers would be given a chance to buy Spore during related content, of course -- video of users' Spore creations, space travel, evangelical sermons about creationism, that sort of thing. Finally, a way to make all that Sporn into a vital part of our economy.

YouTube hasn't decided yet, however, just how the ads will be shown. According to Reuters, YouTube is experimenting with ads that run on top of the video -- scrolling text, for example, that would appear at the bottom of your video as it played. I hope you weren't watching a video about text at the bottom of your screen. YouTube is also considering pre-video ads, like the kind already featured on sites like GameTrailers and GameVideos, but they're hesitant -- nobody wants to sit through a 15-second ad to watch a 3-second clip, after all.