To Simon and David’s point, yes – views and therefore donations will be orders of magnitude lower when videos aren’t featured on the homepage, but you can’t expect Youtube to do all the work for you! It isn’t their role to provide you with their most valuable traffic for free – the interesting part of this story is in the applications of using the platform Youtube provides.

Let’s just say a non-profit is advertising on a video that gets much fewer traction on the site. Instead of $10,000 per day you’re getting $17. I can’t think of one small non-profit that would turn down a 100% free platform for bringing in $500 worth of monthly revenue.

But let’s say that, hey – we actually want to put some effort into taking advantage of this no-cost opportunity. Instead of only placing our ads on some loosely connected content (like a Nat Geo clip), we also create our own video and advertise on that. Coupled with the A/B testing that should be going on on our website, ads, and any other touchpoints, we distill our message into a compelling ad and maybe we’re now making $30 a day. $1000 a month in ancillary donations? I’ll take that. Not to mention the awareness the impressions are generating.

PLUS if you’re even a bit more motivated – that landing page your ad is linked to is capturing leads at the same time it’s generating donations – so with their permission, we now have an ever-growing list of donors and registrants to contact and rely on.

I think the only way you can lose on this is if you expect Youtube to do all the work for you.

Chris
The Caritas Collective

I am Karan.

Please My Site is Visite……..

TECH CRUNCH — Mar 27 — YouTube launched a new feature for non-profit organizations called “Call to Action”, allowing these organizations to place special overlay ads on their videos free of charge. These overlays can direct viewers to the non-pro…

Excerpt: “Earlier this week YouTube launched a new feature for non-profit organizations called “Call to Action”, allowing these organizations to place special overlay ads on their videos free of charge…”

Article source:http://www…

Then again, if charity:water paid a $20 CPM, it would have cost $4000 for the ad and that in itself is a decent ROI, but it doesn’t include the homepage placement, and this was a rare instance of an ad running with a video that was also an ad for the same thing, so all in all one would anticipate a much higher impact, especially since people who were watching the video had some inclination to do so.

If the ad were to run alongside a related but not totally similar video – say, a clip from a National Geographic Channel show – then the returns would presumably be far lower.

On top of all that, YouTube will then have to weigh its opportunity costs for giving the non-profit that prime real estate and ad space.

But yes, it is great that $10K went to a worthy charity in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I don’t want to raise much of a stink over what’s an admirable effort. I just hope it performs better – for the sake of the charities and YouTube.