A bunch of Google’s premium paid video content is temporarily available for free, courtesy of a sponsor whose ad banner appears just above the video pane. In addition to the banner, there is also a post-roll ad from the same sponsor. Supposedly, there are 5 sponsors total, and they are linked to content type exclusively. I’ve seen HP, Burger King, Netflix, Shopzilla, LowerMyBills and that appears to be it. I’ve not noticed BK to be a big online sponsor, so I find this pretty interesting - they seem to have taken all the cartoons and sports videos.

Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, thinks this may be in part a response to a lack of users purchasing of the paid content. Still, the reports that I have seen place Google well behind the video leaders YouTube and MySpace.

John Batelle must have emailed Google about how it works, and it appears that Google says that Advertisers bid to sponsor individual videos. I wonder when they will actually start running contextual ads rather than having advertisers bidding on the videos themselves. Would they not at least allow bidding on keywords in the metadata soon?