Google is now playing video commercials on their homepage.
This inline video ad from AT&T appeared on the Google search page for the keyword “phone” – the video clip remains hidden until you click the “Watch Commercial” link. You then get to see the video in a neat drop-down video player.
Am hoping that these ads will fetch higher rates for Google since it is served only on-demand when requested by the user.
Though these video ads appear with other CPC ads on Google search results, the advertiser will pay when users click to see the video, even if they never click through to the advertiser’s site. However, an advertiser only pays for one click according to Danny Sullivan.
Marissa Mayer earlier told the NYT that text ads are not as effective on pages with search results that include images and video because the eyes of users automatically gravitate to the images more than the text.
Since Google search pages now include image thumbnails and video clips, this is probably the reason why they have video ads now in addition to the regular text ads.
Related: Google AdSense Sandbox