Google is the big news today with two major product initiatives.    The first is Google’s entry into the health records management business with trial recordkeeping at a Cleveland hospital.   AP reports

The second Google development is adsense for video, yet another attempt to monetize video.   I tested the last attempt, using YouTube advertising embeds, here at Funniest Online Videos.    The results were abysmal in terms of monetization although I didn’t push a lot of traffic through the site and used cheap low quality traffic.  However notable about the YouTube problems was Perez Hilton’s huge celebrity site with millions of visitors which only had something like $5000 in revenues despite many millions of clip views.    Perez has switched to different advertising approaches.

However I’m guessing Google’s been learning from the poor YouTube system and that the adsense will involve better targeting and probably better returns.    That said, I remain very skeptical that video can monetize well.   As with social networking or a TV show, a person’s relationship to the medium is very important in these money relationships.   Searching offers the potential for good monetization of a person’s natural behavior and relationship to the media – often it’s a “win win” where your search for camera information and camera deals also presents you with advertising you *want to see* because it’s relevant to your needs.    It is very hard to make that happen with video or social networking, which remain pretty barren environments for advertisers. 

…. and in the “old news” department Blodget suggests that the fat lady is singing in the Yahoo Microsoft deal and it’ll go down this way.    This scenario – minor jousting by MS followed by a small increase in the offer followed by Yahoo aquiescence – sounds very reasonable to me.