Big Music Opportunity in Google's 'AdSense for Video' Plan

Google's new video version of AdSense will let any site that streams over a million videos per month apply transparent text overlay ads and video preroll ads to their videos, giving them a new way to make money from showing videos, even if those videos get embedded on other sites.

The video versions of the familiar Google Adsense ads will likely cost Google's clients a lot more than text ads do, so there's a big opportunity here for sites that show lots of videos, music sites included.

Record labels used to give their music videos away -- a holdover from the days when MTV could really move product. Around four years ago, the labels wised up and began charging fees to sites that displayed their videos.

Now that there's a way for those sites to harness Google's massive advertising engines for more lucrative video ads, music video sites footage sites could flourish, claims MusicAlly, and I think they're right. There's also an opportunity here for large-scale concert footage archives and sites that let users pair their own videos with music.

By Eliot Van Buskirk