"Ads are best when they’re not annoying"

"Best" for who, and "best" for what?

Unfortunately, ads that disrupt attention are the most effective.

> Unfortunately, ads that disrupt attention are the most effective.

I don't really agree, I think (online) ads that disrupt attention better train us to ignore them... causing banner blindness. And banner blindness is suboptimal for both the visitor AND the advertiser. Plus, it raises the barrier for website owners to include these video units (as they may be rightful wary of visitors fleeing their site), thus giving less distribution to the ads. But of course, there may be place for different kind of ad concepts on the market – it's only that usually Google erred on the side of more minimalist ads concepts in the past, so this is a somewhat noteworthy continuing development in a different direction...

Philipp:

don't you mean they're much more obstrusive?

Thanks Luke.

Edited to what I meant now:

"this is a far step from the minimalist ad approaches of Google's past, and much less obtrusive than the old, more tasteful YouTube ads we saw"
--->
"this is a far step from the minimalist ad approaches of Google's past, and the much less obtrusive old, more tasteful YouTube ads we saw"

I agree that the unit displays too many ads. The “companion ad” should've been enough.

I wonder how those two ads are related to the video.

The video is about advertising, AdSense, video distribution etc.

Looks like the Adsense Video Unit account roll out has begun for U.S. publishers. You can see a live version of the standard player here (scroll down): http://www.freshtribe.com/story/music-mp3s-seeqpod-playable-search-engine.aspx

It's too bad that they don't allow you to use the Video Unit with individual videos, but instead have to choose between Automated Content or Category/ Provider. Hopefully, they will open up a bit more in the future. I will say it's super simple to setup.

Yeah, you should be able to pick whatever video you want. Anyway, I've got mine up...here it is... Video Unit in action
http://floatlikearock.com/adsense-video-units/