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November 13, 2008

More YouTube Ads

Two years after being acquired by Google, YouTube still hasn't figured out how to monetize the site. "We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying. But we have a number — and, of course, Google is an innovative place," said Eric Schmidt in August.

One of the new products replicates Google's search ads and adjusts them to a video site. "Sponsored Videos is a self-serve advertising platform that will allow you to promote your video to the audience you are interested in reaching in an easy, effective, democratic, and affordable way. Then, when people use YouTube to search for videos, YouTube will display the most relevant, compelling videos alongside the search results," explains YouTube Blog. Any company or YouTube user from the US can promote his channel or one his videos next to the search results.

Since YouTube controls the search results and hosts the videos, it can provide more measurable results. YouTube can track if the user watched the entire video, if he subscribed to the channel or clicked on the link to the advertiser's homepage.


Another part of YouTube's monetization strategy is expanding the in-video ads to embeddable players. "To date, YouTube has only run ads against partner videos on YouTube itself, and with people viewing millions of embedded YouTube videos every day, this meant that partners were not generating revenue from their views outside YouTube.com. But now, YouTube partners will be able to capitalize on their popularity across the internet and generate revenue from their content no matter where their video lives," informs AdSense Blog. Until now, many YouTube partners disabled the option to embed videos because they couldn't make money from this distribution channel. This change will only affect 4% of the videos uploaded to YouTube, but the percentage of views is much more significant.


The text ads displayed at the bottom of the video can be minimized, but they could cover an important part of a video (for example: annotations, captions) and they're distracting. Most of them link to web pages, but there are some ads that open a new video inside the player.

Google needs to make YouTube profitable and it's nice to see that the ads are often relevant, they don't interrupt videos and they don't make you wait.

8 comments:

  1. "Two years after being acquired by Google, YouTube still hasn't figured out how to monetize the site."

    Not so sure about that. Maybe publicly they're slow in launching these things but Google might have planned them even before the YouTube acquisition -- and then taken it slowly because of trying not to annoy copyright owners, the community of uploaders, viewers, embedders, ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why does all the videos which got ADS in it has a strange yellow mark in it?

    Is that mark is like a sign for when in the video the ADS will popup?

    Here's another one,
    http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/2734/whatisthattq1.jpg

    ReplyDelete
  3. most of the ads were political ads.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Sponsored Videos is a self-serve advertising platform"

    that PIRATES concepts already in play from MUCH HIGHER QUALITY VIDEO ENCODING SITES like

    http://blip.tv

    ReplyDelete
  5. I hate ads in any way. I liked youtube because of that. The web is so full of trash that I block every ad I see. It's a constant battle because I don't need ads for anything. I won't click any ad if I can. It wastes webpages space. Instead of a great readable size page we have a damn AD! in the way. To hell with ads and the ones who make them.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ads are necessary for the life of internet. Just like in TVs. You find a lot of ads also in tv. Otherwise you could only watch junk tv shows. For those, who don't like ads, there is a way to hide the ads. Some of my friends use it. But like I said, everyone needs ads !

    ReplyDelete
  7. News flash: Most of the time ads on the internet are clicked by accident, by someone trying to click the X button to close the ad and missing.

    ReplyDelete

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