IP Democracy: Google Pushes Video Ad Boundaries with Viacom

Google is poised to capture the web video advertising market and now the search giant has wooed at least one major video entertainment company to join it as it explores this new territory. Google announced today a new pact with Viacom that will allow site owners to post video from “SpongeBob SquarePants” and MTV’s “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County” on their pages.

The videos will be accompanied by video advertising and Viacom, Google and the site owners will split the revenue. But, in an important move to eclipse the rise of other services that share ad revenue with video contributors, Google plans to give Viacom more than two-thirds of the ad revenue, compared to the usual 50-50 split.

In an interesting twist, Viacom will sell the ad space for this project, a change of course for Google, which usually brokers the ads. Another part of the deal (press release here) gives Google Video the right to sell downloadable Viacom programming, such as “South Park,” “The Chappelle Show,” “Jackass” and “Punked” at $1.99/download.

The deal suits Viacom just fine because it’s a revenue-generating way of distributing its videos on the Internet — as opposed to have those videos distributed without permission anyway. And Google gets a major supporter in the content community with Viacom as it pushes not only video advertising, but also online video sales.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on August 7, 2006 3:13 PM to IP Democracy