Just when you thought paid inclusion was finally dead with holdout Yahoo getting out of the space, it’s come back from the most unlikeliest of sources: Google. Below, a look at the experiment plus reexamining the FTC’s guidelines about disclosing paid ads. Does saying “Promoted Videos” on YouTube rather than “Sponsored Videos” meet these?

For those unfamiliar with paid inclusion, it is where advertisers pay to have their listings included within editorial results, rather than being listed separately from them as paid placement search ads. In paid inclusion, there’s also no guarantee that the ads will show in a particular position.

Paid inclusion is a dinosaur left over from the days when you had companies that would sell a search partner only editorial results, leaving it to that partner to outsource with someone else for paid listings. For example, Microsoft once had its search engine using editorial results from Inktomi and paid results from Overture. It is also a remnant from before the days when search ads generated so much revenue that there was no need to deal with “messy” paid inclusion.

Messy? Sure. Yahoo would tell the world how fresh and complete its index was. Yet to site owners, it would pitch paid inclusion as a way to ensure that your pages were getting regularly visited by its spider or not overlooked entirely. It’s also messy to explain to searchers that these paid listings integrated into editorial results aren’t “ads” simply because they weren’t guaranteed to rank.

Paid inclusion is so messy that Google’s founders took an extraordinary step of speaking out against it in their IPO registration document of April 2004 several times. I’ll come back to those statements, but let’s look at what’s happening on Google now

The folks over at Range Online Media spotted new ads that are integrated directly within shopping results. Below are some screenshots they also provided me:

The arrow points to the ads. Here’s another example:

Here’s a close-up of the ad integration:

I can’t see these, when I look at the same pages, such as here. That’s because it’s an experiment that Google confirmed to me is being shown only to a small number of people. These are also separate from the other Google Product Ads rolled out this month to everyone.

I asked about these being paid inclusion. In response, I was sent:

At Google, ads are always labeled to indicate that the information is sponsored. We’re currently running a test in which Product Listing Ads appear on the Google Product Search page when a user clicks to ‘Compare Prices.’ Like the product listings, these ads provide information such as prices and ratings, so when a user sorts the information, the list changes the order of both the listings and the ads. As always, the ads are labeled as advertisements, and this experiment is intended to help us understand whether this is a useful experience for our users. This feature is currently in a limited beta with a small number of U.S.-based advertisers, and as with all tests, we may make changes to our current experiment in the future.

Wow. That made me feel more than ever this was paid inclusion. See, even though there’s an ad label attached to the listings, the fact that they are integrated within editorial results themselves rather than being segregated from them is one sign. In addition, if you can sort the results, then the ads have no guaranteed placement, which again is a core element of paid inclusion.

Now let’s go back to what Google’s founders said about the practice in the IPO papers (I’ve bolded key parts):

Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.

And:

We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible, independent of financial incentives. Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them.

And:

Objectivity. We believe it is very important that the results users get from Google are produced with only their interests in mind. We do not accept money for search result ranking or inclusion. We do accept fees for advertising, but it does not influence how we generate our search results. The advertising is clearly marked and separated. This is similar to a newspaper, where the articles are independent of the advertising. Some of our competitors charge web sites for inclusion in their indices or for more frequent updating of pages. Inclusion and frequent updating in our index are open to all sites free of charge. We apply these principles to each of our products and services. We believe it is important for users to have access to the best available information and research, not just the information that someone pays for them to see.

And:

Froogle [the name for Google Product Search back then] enables people to easily find products for sale online…. Most online merchants are also automatically included in Froogle’s index of shopping sites. Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle, our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased. As with many of our products, Froogle displays relevant advertising separately from search results.

At best, Google could excuse the current experiment from being paid inclusion by saying that these advertisers are not being charged to be included. That if they want to be in those listings, that’s free if they put in product feeds. But paid inclusion overall was rarely pitched as a way only to be included. It was pitched as a way to guarantee fast inclusion and constant updates. And the unspoken benefit was that it put you right in the mix of the regular results.

When I spoke further with Google about the move, the company stressed that the ads all have ad disclaimers and that the testing will also look at putting the ads outside the regular results and also may not allow for sorting. What you see above isn’t final, by any measure.

Certainly the ad disclaimer helps, but as long as they’re integrated right in the regular results, with sorting, that’s paid inclusion in my book. It’s also paid inclusion according to the Federal Trade Commission, from its definition in 2002 (again, I’ve bolded the key part):

Paid inclusion can take many forms. Examples of paid inclusion include programs where the only sites listed are those that have paid; where paid sites are intermingled among non-paid sites; and where companies pay to have their Web sites or URLs reviewed more quickly, or for more frequent spidering of their Web sites or URLs, or for the review or inclusion of deeper levels of their Web sites, than is the case with non-paid sites….

In a related matter, I asked why YouTube’s “Promoted Videos” aren’t called “Sponsored Videos,” as they once were. “Sponsored” has been the search industry’s term-of-choice when it comes to indicating what’s an ad. It’s used by Google, Yahoo and Bing, and it was a word the FTC particularly seemed to like when it issued guidelines.

Google emailed me:

Whenever a Promoted Video appears on YouTube, it is marked as a ‘Promoted Video’ to indicate that it is an advertisement. This label is hyperlinked to the YouTube Glossary, which offers more information about the Promoted Videos advertising program.

OK, I knew that. But these were called “Promoted Videos” originally, then changed to “Sponsored Videos,” then changed back to Promoted, which to my ear doesn’t sound as ad-like. So why were they changed?

To that, Google noted a blog post from March saying:

We think “Promoted Videos” more accurately describes this program than “Sponsored Videos,” the original name.

I was also told that “Promoted” was determined to be more descriptive and appropriate.

Determined how? Google wouldn’t share that. So maybe there was some testing done to see if users understood that “Promoted” better explained that these are ads. Or maybe a product team decided “Promoted” got a better clickthrough than “Sponsored” because people did NOT realize these were ads.

Google has massively ramped up where and how it shows ads over the past year. As the company continues to grow, it also has people without a firm history of knowing why ads are separated from search results and why certain words have been used to indicate what’s an ad and what’s not. Calling something “Promoted” that’s an ad in one part of Google while it’s “Sponsored” in another isn’t consistent and generates confusion. Mixing ads into editorial results also potentially generates confusion. Neither makes me feel particular good, but hey, maybe that’s just me.

Though the level of discourse in YouTube comments will never win awards, Google appears to be quietly testing a comment search feature. You won’t find it anywhere obvious in the YouTube interface — not on a video page, not even in Advanced Search. It’s available at this URL (you can change the query at the end):

http://www.youtube.com/comment_search?q=U2+360+Tour

As ReadWriteWeb points out, this actually could be a valuable monitoring tool for companies, individuals, artists, and other celebrities that are the subject of a lot of YouTube videos and comments. There’s even a real-time element at work: Updates are pushed out as new comments are indexed, and YouTube lists a handful of “trending topics” from user comments.

But this appears to be very much a beta project. To test the comment search, I grabbed an exact snippet of text from a comment that was posted a week ago on one of my own videos. Comment search found no matching results:

Perhaps this is one reason why comment search isn’t yet part of the main YouTube interface.

Update: A YouTube product manager emailed this update regarding the comment above not appearing in comment search: “We return comment results from the past seven days and it looks like your U2 comment was just on the lip of that period.”

Update, October 19: According to this YouTube blog post, comment search has been moved into Test Tube, the experimental lab area of YouTube.

The Google Blog announced you ca now buy YouTube Promoted Video ads directly in the Google AdWords console. Google said that any advertiser with video content in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands can do this today.

Previously, all YouTube Promoted Video ads were managed on YouTube at ads.youtube.com. Opening up the management within the AdWords console will hopefully give the product more exposure to advertisers. I personally tried to find this in my AdWords account, but could not find it. So maybe the roll out has not hit all advertisers just yet.

Most recent news about this product was that Google enabled content powered YouTube ads.

The Google AdSense Blog announced they are now bringing YouTube Promoted Videos to AdSense ad spots throughout the web.

Initially, Promoted Videos were shown on YouTube search results and then on related videos. Now, if an AdSense site has ad slots for 300×250 Medium Rectangle, 336×280 Large Rectangle, 728×90 Leaderboard, 250×250 Square, and 200×200 Small Square, the YouTube Promoted videos can show up there as well.

Yes, AdSense already has video ads, but these are different, in that these are YouTube videos and not video ads published directly to AdWords. To learn more about the standard videos, click here. To learn more about these YouTube Promoted Videos, click here.

Years ago, McDonald’s restaurants advertised how many burgers they had served right on the big sign at each location. And when it got too many to count, the signs changed to simply say, “Billions and billions served.” YouTube is quickly reaching that same tipping point for online video views.

According to comScore, Google/YouTube served up more than 10 billion video views in August — the first time any video site has surpassed the 10 billion mark. Other firsts during the month of August? Online users watched more than 25 billion videos overall, an all-time high. And 161 million U.S. Internet users watched video online in August, the biggest monthly total ever.

Surprising no one, Google/YouTube continues to be the dominant video provider according to comScore’s numbers, showing just under 40% of all videos watched online during August.

DoubleClick’s advertising exchange has been in the works since at least 2007 and before Google acquired the company. But this morning Google is formally announcing the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which reflects a milestone of technology and platform integration between Google and its DoubleClick unit.

Google sees this an an opportunity to attract more display and brand ad dollars online and to boost revenues on that side of the house, where there is much more room for growth than in paid search (at least in the US business).

Some version of an “exchange” has been around for awhile at DoubleClick but mostly under the radar. However with this formal launch or relaunch Google is late to the exchange party. Yahoo with its acquisition of RightMedia in 2007 and Microsoft with its parallel 2007 acquisition of AdECN have been actively in the exchange business for a couple of years.

There are a number of others too calling themselves exchanges, including ADSDAQ, Traffiq, even AdBrite characterizes itself as an ad exchange. Indeed there may be as many as eight or more “exchanges” operating today in online display advertising. That compares with almost 400 “ad networks” of one sort or another. The promise of an exchange is greater efficiency, greater transparency, broader reach for advertisers and better yields for publishers.

Google says that it has been working hard for the past couple of years, since the DoubleClick acquisition closed, to integrate the companies’ technology toward these goals. It says it already has the majority of the top 25 online display networks signed up as well as major newspaper publishers, magazine sites and others. There’s no exclusivity dimension so publishers theoretically can participate in the DoubleClick exchange and other exchanges. But the point of an exchange is to get access to what amounts to the whole market rather than having to go from place to place to fill inventory or buy audiences.

Google says the DoubleClick exchange will be “seamlessly integrated into the AdWords platform and AdSense on the publisher side.” Here’s how Google describes the process and the benefits:

The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange has been rebuilt using Google’s technology and infrastructure. It contains a wide variety of key features that will help improve returns for advertisers and enable publishers to get the most value out of their online content.

On the “sell side”, participation in the new Ad Exchange is designed for major online publishers. It already includes a wide variety of large premium publishers including newspapers, large portals, entertainment and branded sites. In addition, ad space on Google’s third party AdSense publisher sites, representing over 76% of U.S. online audiences and 73% of global online audiences**, is being made available through the new Ad Exchange. This will increase the volume of quality display advertisers available to Google’s AdSense publishers.

On the “buy side”, the new Ad Exchange is designed for ad networks and agency networks – companies that connect web sites with advertisers. It already includes over 40 ad networks across North America and Europe, including most of the 25 largest ad networks in the US*, with more now to be added. Additionally, AdWords advertisers will be able to run ads on sites in the AdExchange, using their existing AdWords interface.

Features of the new Ad Exchange include a completely new interface; a “real-time bidding” feature to allow ad networks to use their own technology to bid on an impression-by-impression basis; a “dynamic allocation” system, which automatically generates online publishers the highest return for every impression by allocating ads to the highest-paying sales channel, based on real time data; more granular publisher and advertiser controls; payments and clearing managed by Google; and a new API to allow ad networks to extend the functionality of the Ad Exchange.

As a basic matter, to gain access, publishers need to be on a Google ad server, especially DART (the system’s not compatible with OpenX or Altas for example). And though the system uses a real-time auction for each impression, large publishers may set a minimum reserve price. Smaller, existing AdSense publishers will not be able to do the same but Google says that increased competition for their ad inventory will boost CPMs.

Invoicing and payments will be uniform and greatly simplified for both sides according to Google. And the tools will all be integrated and accessible through the AdWords dashboard.

In terms of Google’s display ad strategy — an arena where it has the potential to realize the most growth and new revenues — there are really three (or four) components: new and improved display ad formats for the content network (and integrated into search in some cases), video on YouTube and via Google TV Ads and this new ad exchange. Given Google’s reach, influence and footprint, this could turn out to be a huge new arena for the company.

Danny may weigh in on this point but on the call with Google we were struck by a kind of “bifurcation” between the way that large and smaller publishers are handled in the system, vis-a-vis transparency and minimum pricing. Larger publishers in the exchange will have complete transparency in terms of understanding Google’s share/commission on transactions. Whereas small AdSense publishers remain largely in the dark about the revenue split and won’t be able to set a reserve price.

Putting that aside, and others may have more to say on that point than I, with this announcement Google has joined the battle for display advertising dollars in earnest and signaled its intention to be a major player.

No one reading Search Engine Land should be surprised to hear stories about Google’s dominance of the search landscape. But the degree to which Google dominates in some areas is sure to make you raise an eyebrow.

Consider India and Brazil, two growing Internet markets. ComScore released some stunning numbers about what’s happening in those two countries and how Google owns a lot of the online experience there.

In Brazil, for example, about 30% of a person’s online time is spent on a Google property. In India, it’s about 29% of online time. For perspective, comScore says that the worldwide average amount of time spent on Google properties is 9.4%.

Google accounts for almost 90% of searches conducted in Brazil, and 88% in India, comScore says. But it’s not just Google’s search engine powering this dominance. Consider these numbers:

India

• Social networking: Google’s Orkut gets 68% of time spent in this category
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 83% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps has 64% of time spent

Brazil

• Social networking: Orkut gets 96% of time spent
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 92% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps gets 71% of time spent

ComScore suggests that Google’s dominance in these two countries is because their emergence on the world scene coincided with Google’s rise online. Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure: It’s Google’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

The Google Base Blog announced they have added a new attribute for Google Product Search merchants to submit product videos for specific products. Google Product Search can now show videos from YouTube.

Here is a picture of the Nikon D90 with YouTube videos:

How do merchants get their videos to show up for Google Product Searches? When you submit your Google Base data feed, make sure to include the new youtube attribute. This will help Google determine if they should show a video for that product listing. Google said, “we can’t guarantee that submitted videos will be selected.” Either way, it is likely worth doing, if you have the videos to link to.

YouTube appears to finally be embracing its status as the second most-used search engine on the planet. Its new masthead design, just announced tonight, puts a much bigger emphasis on the site’s search capabilities.

The new masthead looks very much like the Google.com masthead on a search results page: logo, large search box, and a few navigational text links. (With the obvious difference that YouTube’s links are below the seearch box, and Google’s are above.)

YouTube’s blog posts says to expect more changes in the masthead: “Next up, we’ll be focusing on giving you the controls to make the masthead more personalized.”

Earlier today Google announced that it had acquired On2 Technologies in a stock deal worth approximately $106 million. There’s little true information about how Google intends to use On2 in the release. Here’s the Google quote:

“Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform,” said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google. “We are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2’s team and technology will help us further that goal.”

On2 essentially offers customers video compression technology. There are both PC (YouTube) and mobile implications here. There are others with more technical insights than I on these issues, so here are a few blurbs from them:

NewTeeVee:

Just about everyone that powers online video or has their own Flash player, including Adobe, continues to pay On2 licensing fees for its VP6 video codec. However, in the last couple of years, the industry has largely chosen H.264 as VP6’s successor. Though H.264’s selling point is its high quality, a big part of the reason people moved away from VP6 was those On2 licensing fees. “It was like dealing with Tony Soprano every year,” said a source today. “If you were a day late…It was archaic licensing. It was just a nightmare.”

Still, VP6 is already installed on computers everywhere, and with Google managing its licensing (or even dropping it), the format could come back into power. The open-source video compression format of choice, OGG Theora, which is being pushed by Mozilla, has not won industrywide confidence, so it could be that Google is trying to substitute another contender. Google, with its Chrome browser, is one of the leaders of the new HTML 5 standard, which handles video natively and could eventually eliminate the need for Flash and Silverlight-type plug-ins.

GigaOM:

I would pay special attention to what Google does with On2 on Android, because there is an opportunity for it to outshine rivals such as RIM and Apple. Just look at On2’s mobile video arsenal: It owns technologies for embedded video for mobile platforms (Hantro) and On2 TrueMobile System, a mobile video system designed to send video across the networks — including 2.5G, Edge, 3G and 4G networks — using On2’s VP7 technology.

TechCrunch:

Some of its codec designs are known as VP3, VP4, VP5, TrueMotion VP6, TrueMotion VP7 and VP8. Its customers include Adobe, Skype, Nokia, Infineon, Sun Microsystems, Mediatek, Sony, Brightcove, and Move Networks. On2, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, is headquartered in Clifton Park, NY . . .

If would be great if Google decides to open-source On2’s VP7 and VP8 video codecs and free them up as the worldwide video codec standards, thus becoming alternatives to the proprietary and licenced H264 codecs. On2 has always claimed VP7 is better quality than H264 at the same bitrate.

Also noteworthy: Google could use the VP8 codec for YouTube in HTML5 mode, basically forcing its many users to upgrade to HTML5-compliant browsers instead of using Flash formats.

If you just can’t get enough of this sort of analysis and video-format speak, there’s more on Techmeme.