Hate to be dramatic about it, but there was no question in my mind since I tried Google Adsense for Videos that the service won’t last too long. YouTube has not been the cash cow Google hoped it’d be, which is why it’s getting a makeover to move a bit away from user-generated content to generate more revenue for Google. Google Adsense for Video was a bad waste of ad space at best and a torture for publishers at worst. Google didn’t make enough money with them either:

… we frequently review our products and features to ensure their effectiveness. After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we’ve found that it hasn’t had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we’ve decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites.

It’s noble to try new things and test things out to figure out what works and what doesn’t on your website. But Google Adsense video units were truly atrocious. That doesn’t mean there weren’t people who were having success with Google Adsense Video. It’s just that it wasn’t making enough money for Google to continue the product.

If you have read popular Adsense books such as Adsense Secrets, you know that your goal should be to integrate Adsense into your pages in a way that it doesn’t screen “I am an Ad!” People are mentally blocking ads these days, and I didn’t think it was going to change with video ads. If you still enjoy displaying videos on your blog, you don’t have to necessarily remove your Adsense video codes from your site. They will automatically show YouTube videos on your site:

Once video units are retired at the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct 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 have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Of course, you may want to replace your video units with something that actually pays you in the long run. YouTube is great but who would want to display YouTube videos in hot ad spots?