Google to retire video ads

Google have announced that they are going to be retiring video ads. The email sent out the adsense users read as follows:

Hello,

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 monetise 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&hl=en_GB. Alternatively, if you have fewer 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 Centre at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12182&hl=en_GB.

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

Yours sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

It seems that the projected revenue from video units might have been over optimistic, but many insiders in the industry have interpreted this move as the first steps in google's separation strategy from youtube as an advertising channel in favour of googles own adwords video advertising technology.

Whatever the reason, it appears that the future of online video content delivery is going to be quite interesting...