I just got a letter from Google Adsense letting me know their video units are retiring. I have some mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think Google should be doing whatever they can to streamline their business and keep an eye out for what’s working and what isn’t. On the other hand, video units were my biggest moneymaker when they were clicked on. That being said, I don’t use much of Adsense anymore to begin with because the ads just don’t perform well on my blogs.

For reference, here’s the email:

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know that we’ll be retiring AdSense video units at the end of April. After reviewing this feature, we’ve found that it hasn’t been performing as well as we had hoped, so we’ve decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites.

We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

If you’d still like to display free video content from YouTube, you can do so through YouTube.com directly: visit any specific video page for the embed code, or sign in to your YouTube account to create a playlist. For more information about embedding YouTube videos, please visit http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=57788. Alternatively, if you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Although video units are being retired, other video offerings within AdSense aren’t affected. Video ads may still appear on your pages and AdSense for video is still available for eligible publishers. If you’d like more information about the retiring of video units, please visit our Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12182.

Thanks for your support of video units in the past, and we appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

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Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

I think what really wasn’t working here is the format of the video units. The idea was that you could embed YouTube videos into your blogs and people using the player would generate revenue for you when the videos were played. The problem was, none of the sizes of the players are economical in terms of real estate on your blog. They were too big for most spaces and had a clunky interface. Perhaps they are going back to the drawing board to redesign them. We’ll have to wait and see.

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