From our early video test results, it’s apparent that video ad relevancy is far from tuned. Hulu may have more monetizable traffic than YouTube, but our analysis indicates the contextual search advertising opportunity around embedded videos is virtually untapped.

Our initial crawling results show that nearly 30% of blog pages contain an embedded video. Over 50% of these pages had ads so we checked to see if the ads were relevant to the video content.

Not so much.

We sampled the embedded videos, and the results were eye-opening and often hilarious. Low-carb diet ads paired with Chevy Chase skits. Anti-wrinkle cream spots next to Paintball safety videos. Kelly Moore paints next to a Miley Cyrus dance-off.

The revenue per video must be abysmal on these examples. Multiply this opportunity by the tens of thousands like these that proliferate across the Web daily.

Perhaps this opportunity will finally bring AdSense and publishers closer together? In exchange for a share of all advertising revenue generated from their content, publishers can provide AdSense and others with an API containing the location of their embedded videos and associated meta data to increase the relevancy of ads. Increase the relevancy, increase the revenue. Expand the pie for everyone.

Online content syndication used to be a simple business. You chased licensing deals with the major U.S. portals, outsourced your reprint business and deflected any unauthorized re-use to your legal team for action. At renewal time, you were either in a ‘data-free zone’ with zero insight on licensee usage or you spent several painful weeks analyzing data that never quite gave you the right answer.

But everything has changed. You need a strategy to participate in the phenomenal growth of social networks and blogs. International growth is exploding - how can you quickly build a licensee lead pipeline? Finally, where can you find a scalable solution to keep track of the bad guys who continuously grab your articles without permission?

But where to start? Here are 8 practical tips to supercharge your content syndication business.

1. Create a content usage feedback loop. Without feedback on the specific articles and genres of content being used by your licensees, you are flying blind. Improve your product and your customers’ satisfaction by reviewing licensee usage in as much detail as you want.
2. Monitor actual usage vs license terms. How many articles do your licensees use every day? Are articles being used on multiple domains? Is usage compliant with the time period restrictions? Our customers tell us that as much as 30% additional revenue is there for the taking.
3. Get your licensees to link. A link back to your site will help your search engine positioning and signal to Google that your article is the original. More info at the Google Webmaster blog.
4. Give users a reason to click back to your site. If your monetization strategy depends on attracting visits back to your site, make sure that the amount of content included in your RSS feed is optimized. If I can read 100% of your content on several different blog sites why would I want to click?
5. Don’t miss the branding opportunity. Many RSS feeds make use of the format’s <image> sub element to enable your logo to be displayed along with your article to achieve greater brand exposure.
6. Watch your search rank. Hundreds of thousands of sites exist for the sole purpose of re-using professionally-produced content to siphon off traffic and ad dollars. Take action to protect your revenue stream.
7. Participate in the long tail. It’s big, and it can be monetized. Your content is appearing all over social networks and blog. Using established licensing platforms like iCopyright and others, you can tap into long tail growth.
8. Implement usage based billing. With web-wide visibility of your content’s usage, you can open up new market segments with a more flexible pricing structure. Instead of all-or-nothing, you can create your own content-vending machine.

Content is still King and it’s an exciting time to be a syndicator. You just need the tools to make sure you are collecting value for every instance of your content across the Web.

YouTube’s 73% market share gives them plenty of room to experiment. And it’s not difficult to determine why Google has stripped the ability to watch videos directly in search results. To paraphrase a famous politician, “It’s the revenue, stupid.”

At YouTube’s scale, increasing your eCPM by a few pennies adds up, particularly when there is pressure to hit your quarterly numbers. When I was at Yahoo!, employees judged how the quarter was going by how soon paid advertisements replaced previously “internal-only” spots on the front page. You were foolish to plan a launch or critical initiative the last month of a quarter that relied on front page placements because the inventory just went away.

The question is – whose video is You Tube monetizing and, if it’s yours—or one derived from your video, are you sure that you are getting your fair share ?