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YouTube has an embeddable player with features that might feel familiar to publishers who've used Blip.tv's show player — it's not meant for casual embeds, and isn't accessible from the standard embed code found on most video pages. It's meant for static placement on Web sites for featuring multiple videos from a single partner, and can carry both the standard in-video overlay ads as well as a text ad block from Google. It was released last October for AdSense customers, but isn't in particularly wide use. Why mention it now?Because an appearance on a political blog was enough to surprise the New York Times's Saul Hansell into remarking on an instance he found "festooned with ads." Though the screenshot featured a video taken from television news and therefore the thumbnail itself was already overly busy with infographics, which contributed most to the impression of the "gaudiness of MySpace." The fact that one of the Times's technology bloggers took so long to take note of an AdSense video unit in the wild tells the real story — even with the promise of a slightly less pitiful revenue sharing check, nobody is using the thing.