Google is offering website owners who embed video clips from YouTube, its online video-sharing service, into their own sites the chance to make money through advertising.

In an expansion of its lucrative AdSense platform, Google will allow web publishers, including amateur bloggers, to place YouTube videos that carry advertising on their sites. The website publisher will take a share of revenue when a visitor watches a clip and any associated ads.

The move would mean that a sailing website could, for instance, put YouTube footage from a yacht race and take a share of the revenue from any advert generated Google's AdSense program that runs alongside the video.

Until recently, Google has largely focused on distributing text-based ads via its AdWords program, which allows advertisers to bid on keywords in return for being displayed in a list of 'sponsored links' when a user conducts on a search on a given topic.

The company's new product - 'video units' - is a sign that it intends to expand its ad delivery system to other types of content, so that, for instance, audio, games and other media could have ads attached to them when embedded on a website.

Visitors watching videos embedded via AdSense will see a 'banner ad' across the top of the video player, as well as a succession of text ads - changing at a rate of about 1 every 10 seconds - at the bottom.

The text ads - which will take up about a fifth of the video player's screen - will be targeted according to the content of the clip and the site which has embedded them, but will not, themselves, be videos. Users can minimise the text ads if they wish.

Web publishers are already able to embed YouTube videos on their sites, but this would be the first opportunity to make money from such clips. Site owners will be able to choose between three sizes of video player, and can also customise the colour scheme.

Google bought YouTube, the web's largest video-sharing site, for $1.6 billion last year.

Initially, only content produced by 100 or so official 'YouTube partners' - mostly small media companies - will be able to be embedded, but the plan is for sites to be able to pick any of YouTube's 'video categories' - such as Entertainment, Comedy, News and Politics - so that clips could be played on a rotating basis.

Any advertising revenue would be shared with both the publisher and the video's producer, Google said, but it declined to specify what percentage would be retained by each.

Among the producers whose content is available for use in the first version of the product are LonelyGirl15, the popular YouTube serial, Extreme Elements, which makes clips about extreme sports, and Ford Models, a modelling agency.

The service would initially only be available to US-based sites that already use AdSense, though there were plans to expand it to different territories, Google said.

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