Google Shuts Video Units for AdSense

Arlene Lee from Google has announced that at the end of April, AdSense will no longer support "video units". This was a program that Google started to allow publishers to run video channels that would be monetized using Google AdSense ads.

The announcement blog post is worth a read – apparently the video ad units were U.S. only and many publishers believe the reason they failed is because Google didn’t provide any guidance on usage. WebProNews has additional thoughts on the closure. If I remember, we tried the video ad units on HTMLCenter but they never produced any real income so we removed them.

Once the closure is final at the end of April, the ad units will be replaced with YouTube banners and/or YouTube video boxes. Arlene suggests you swap out any video ad units with traditional AdSense units.

On another AdSense topic, I learned this weekend that Google has no actual support for their publishers. I don’t believe I was issued a tax form for last year and attempted to contact Google for help. All you get is a form that takes you round and round and a note that they provide "limited email support" – not sure what "limited" means but at least from what I can tell it means "none". Too bad there isn’t a Matt Cutts for AdSense.