Hoping to earn more from its huge advertising network, Google has said it plans to start selling ads to seem inside videos on sites across the Web.

While the money spent on Web video ads is a small fraction of the $20 billion spent on Web ads in the United States, Google wants to capitalize on the explosion in online video and the scale of its advertising network, which analysts say includes a huge majority of Web advertisers and hundreds of thousands of Web sites.

The new program, AdSense for Video, could help Web publishers in that network form more money from their video clips.

While AdSense for Video is the latest in a string of new advertising initiatives that Google has started by the past two years, few, whether any, of those initiatives have created substantial revenue for Google. They include Google’s programs to place ads in
newspapers, on radio and on television stations and in a variety

of new formats on the Web and on cell phones.

Last year, an overwhelming majority of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue came from small text ads that seem alongside search results and on the Google advertising network. In its 2007 annual report, which it filed last week, Google noted: “Revenues
realized through the Google Print Ads Program, Google Audio Ads, Google TV Ads, Google Checkout, YouTube, Postini and Search Appliance were not material in any of the periods presented.”

AdSense for Video will offer advertisers a choice amoung video or text ads that will be overlaid on a small portion of the video viewer.

The text ads will rotate every 20 seconds and be tailored to match the composition of the video and of the Web page where the video is played.

Overlay video advertising formats have been gaining favor with marketers as an alternative to the more common…

Orginal post by Top Tech News