If Google hasn’t focused much on monetizing its video site YouTube to date… it’s now doing so with a vengeance. On Wednesday, the company announced it will start selling ad space on YouTube search-results pages.

The new advertising feature will allow anyone with a video on YouTube to promote it on a search-results page. Advertisers can bid on keywords and their videos will be displayed on the right-hand side of the YouTube search-results page with a small image and some text.

Advertisers will pay whenever a viewer clicks on the ad and can set their maximum price per click. As in Google Adwords, Google will choose the order in which ads are displayed based on how much advertisers are willing to pay, along with the relevance of the video to the keyword.

Here’s some food for thought (and something worth testing!): if you can give your YouTube video ANY title… does that mean that as long as the keyword matches the title… you’ll score highly on relevance?

So, in other words, can you change the title of your video to suit the keyword you wish to target? Or will Google index the text of the video (if applicable)?

Source: Stephanie Clifford, “YouTube to Sell Advertising on Pages of Search Results”, The New York Times, November 12, 2008

If you’ve got it, chances are Google wants it. Well, that is if you’re Wikipedia and attract enough web visitors to make you the 7th most popular website on the Internet (according to Alexa).

And so, Google has launched its Wikipedia beater “Knol”. Knol the website aims to deliver “knols” the articles - authoritative articles about specific topics.

Like Wikipedia, it will allow anyone to contribute useful information. But unlike Wikipedia, articles on Knol will allow contributors to include their bylines. Authors can also get paid by allowing their knol to include ads from Google’s AdSense program and receiving a revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Why is this great for marketers? Well, if the penny hasn’t dropped yet, Knol provides an avenue for you to submit articles that include YOUR byline.

Yesterday, I outlined a strategy for generating traffic from Wikipedia. This equally applies to Knol. Now don’t be surprised if links to external sites are required to have the “no follow” tag but, heck, if Knol takes off, your article could be seen by THOUSANDS of people.

But please don’t expect to be able to submit hypey, vacuous articles or rubbishy PLR articles. This is Google remember.

Sources: Eric Krangel, “Google Launches Wikipedia Killer ‘Knol’: Everything You Wanted To Know About Toilet Clogs, Tooth Pain, More”, Knol