Make room for new video ad formats

This week marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of click-to-play video ads. To that end, we thought it'd be fitting to introduce three new members of our click-to-play video ads family: the 728x90 Leaderboard, the 120x600 Skyscraper, and the 160x600 Wide Skyscraper. Previously, video ads were only enabled for the 300x250 Medium Rectangle, the 336x280 Large Rectangle, the 200x200 Small Square, and the 250x250 Square.

Just like before, users will see a play button on these three ad formats when a video ad is available - this play button will appear on the right side of the Leaderboard and in the upper half of the Skyscraper formats. Once a user clicks the play button, the video ad will begin to play within the ad unit. Here's an example:



Generating earnings with videos ads in these new formats will also remain the same. If the advertiser has chosen to display the click-to-play video ad as a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) ad, you will be paid for every valid impression of the static image, regardless of plays or clicks to the advertiser's site. If the click-to-play video ad is a cost-per-click (CPC) ad, you'll generate earnings from valid clicks to the advertiser's site rather than clicks on the play button. In either case, you and your site visitors are free to watch the video as frequently as you like. Please keep in mind that you'll need to be opted into image ads in order to receive video ads, but we aren't able to guarantee that video ads will always be available for your content.

We hope these new click-to-play video ad formats will help enhance the advertising experience for both advertisers and publishers. For advertisers, this change provides additional options and inventory for creating click-to-play video ads. At the same time, publishers will benefit from the increased competition among text, image, and video ads in these three formats; if a click-to-play video ad appears in one of your ad units, this means that it has won the auction against other ads and will generate the maximum earnings for you.

If you'd like more information about click-to-play video ads, feel free to visit our Help Center.

Posted by Sandra Tsui - AdSense Publisher Support