Tomorrow, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.
The product’s official name is the Call-To-Action Overlay, and it’s about as straightforward as ads come: it’s a semi-transparent pop-up that links viewers to any website you choose. For example, I could place an overlay on a TechCrunch video inviting users to visit the corresponding post we wrote about it. Yes, it’s that simple.
It’s hard to believe, but you’ve never been able to do this on YouTube before now. If you ever wanted to drive users watching your YouTube video to another site, you’d have to include it as a link in the summary at the right-hand side of the page, which most people ignore anyway. Users can include links in annotations, but only to other YouTube videos. Think back to President Obama’s landmark election campaign, which was helped in no small part by his YouTube presence. If he ever wanted to direct visitors to one of his campaign homepages, he’d have to ask visitors to enter his site’s URL manually. That’s a pretty major hurdle to overcome. This gets rid of it.
So why has YouTube taken so long to implement such an obvious feature? The answer likely boils down to the fact that this is effectively driving traffic away from YouTube, which isn’t an ideal situation for a site that thrives on views. This is probably a somewhat scary step for the video giant, but it’s taking some initiatives to negate any possible downsides. You can only place these customized overlays on a video that you’ve entered into YouTube’s CPC Promoted Videos program. You don’t have to pay anything extra for the Call-To-Action overlay, but you do have to be a paying YouTube advertiser.
The feature has been in testing with select partners and non-profits for some time, and the results have been extremely positive. Last March, the organization charity:water managed to raise $10,000 in a single day by including an overlay on one of its videos. A handful of politicians have also been trying it out, using it to entice voters to sign their petitions. It’s worked well enough that politicians who haven’t had access to the feature are clamoring for it.
At this point the potential uses for the links are fairly obvious. Brands can link their commercials back to the products they’re selling. Publishers (like us) can link back to relevant articles. And politicians can link back to their campaign homepages or petitions. But there’s almost certainly some other kind of creative use for the new ads waiting to be tapped, just as YouTube’s annotations were used to create choose-your-own-adventure video journeys.
I was always annoyed that I couldn’t link up any videos, so I hope this is a real improvement.
BTW what happened to seesmic video comments?
Good question…
This is a great new addition indeed. But YouTube should not have taken such a looooong time to implement this. Did they not get this idea of making overlays possible for those who are paying YouTube advertisers? Sad that things move snail-like inside this video giant.
Seesmic is going into the dead pool tomorrow. TC is waiting to break the news tomorrow which is why he hasn’t replied to you.
YAH… yah.. I love you Jason… but I still hate the fact it has to get in the way of the video.. why not have it below where a user can click and not be annoyed.. I hate all links that get in the way.. I am much more prone to click the ones on the right…
why not just have it at the END of the video, when you’re done watching and got the message.
i am more likely to click [x] to close the ad because it disturbs me, even though, when the video finishes i will be looking for more info on what i saw
Yes, I agree. Currently this ad format exists but the content is randomly chosen. By habit, I ALWAYS click the “x”. These ads will look exactly the same so I don’t know why a user will pay any more attention to them than they do the other ads.
I like the concept of being able to advertise on your own material; it’s actually really smart. I assume that aside from making it easy for viewers to follow a link, it will also prevent the viewer from being distracted from possibly competitive ads.
I agree. It annoys one to be interrupted in between while watching something interesting. All ads are annoying. More so when we get such overlays. There are chances of users clicking these ads accidentally also. And by the way, the ad opens in a new tab/window only right?
sites like justin.tv has been doing these ad overlays forever
Now we can see many many ads on youtube now, just like TV. And I believe this is just the first step for youtube to monitize the website. Due to its huge hardware investment, youtube needs to do more to make money. For youtube fans, we will see another Google like company growing up. Not bad for youtube, not good for us.
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bah… they just need to hire me to take the annoying of their site.. Sometimes a company needs to stick its head in a blender and say… popups don’t work on websites and they don’t work on video.. annoying doesn’t correlate to sales jackasses.. just put a decent url below the video to a site that opens in a new window that doesn’t suck.. the good videos are 3 minutes long.. we do read the add if it is not in our way… if you could give us a preview of the ad that did not get in the way we would consider a well placed argument for clicking if the website does not suck…
Ad companies are stupid.. you cannot continue to show crap urls and expect a repeat click.. good urls increase trust which increases clicking, bad urls make people say f u and not click… adbrit is what I use to me blogs and I cringe at the thought.. is it adbrite.. the spamming ad interface…
Best news ever ! I thought this would never happen…
3rd part can put ads there!
I agree。。。。 。
Does each click get charged based on the CPC rate or its free because you are using a promotional campaign? It’ll be an affiliate marketers dream if YouTube doesn’t charge for the clicks.
This TechMeme article does not explain well enough what is required to be able to put external Links in Youtube videos.
So one has to pay Google for advertising to be able to activate this. But how much is the minimum advertising payment that one has to pay for this external link to become activated?
Does this only work again for video makers based in those certain limited amount of countries or even only those based in the USA?
This is awesome! Now I just need to start doing video marketing on YouTube. But I don’t know what kind of videos I should be doing…Hmm, I’ll have to work on that.
Huge!
just like megaporn
This seems like next steps for Google moving YouTube’s monetization model away from display and towards Pay-Per-Click advertising.
Exactly what Google does best.
Sounds like an interesting functional addition. Besides the obvious benefit to the video poster, I’d expect this could very well drive additional video posting given how desirable the feature is. Meaning, of course, more free content on YouTube.
Does anyone know if the offsite linking happens in the same tab/window or if it opens a new tab/window?
I guess in the next step, Youtube will split users into two class. For paid users, no ads will display, while for unpaid or anonynomous users, ads will be shown during watching.
You should have mentioned that in order to take part in YT’s CPC program your account has to be based in the US. No luck for us folks in Canada.
Ah this totally SUCKS.
I have seen this on a lot of other sites that show video thus far.
This can be cool, but I find it funny that google has also recently retired their video ads ads for adsense publishers. We’ll see how this converts.
Think of how high YouTube videos place in certain SERPs?!?
The spammers are going to love this…guaranteed.
This is cool.
Auto direct YouTube videos to what you are trying to build an audience for.
I believe this feature will bring more people to YouTube as word gets out, rather than taking people away from their services. As more features are offered for people more people will arrive to use those features.
Why should Youtube worry about diverting traffic away? Not sure if being present on Youtube and following up a call-to-action are serving the same objective.
As long as the objective is not the same, the urge to return will be still present.
Best regards,
Gianluigi Cuccureddu
While I like this better than the embedded links that block the video image, I still think it’s the wrong way to promote external links successfully. The first thing I do when any YouTube video starts is hover my mouse right over where I know the little X will show up, just so i can instantly close the ad box.
I’m really surprised with the info in the article that said a charity made money off these types of ads…I assumed everyone ignored them.
Very nice. I don’t think Youtube has anything to fear by pointing people out to other websites. This will make them more of a resource and bring people back who want to learn and discover great causes and other items being featured in the overlay.
This is not smart on many levels.
1. They could have charged for this, not give it away free. Heck, even $25/month would have brought a million marketers pocketbooks out for a huge monthly payday. Or are they just happy to continue not making money? I guess so.
2. YouTube videos will now go from being UGC to “marketing-driven” because all the marketers will fall all over themselves to create videos with links to their crappy products or with affiliate links.
Doesn’t make sense to me. My plan I laid out years ago about building a business channel to separate the UGC from the marketers was not only profitable, but better for everyone.
http://www.jimk...siness-channel/
Any idea of the cost for this? If it displayed at the end of the ad as a call to action it wouldn’t suck half as hard.
http://www.yout...oops/error.html
youtube.com down??
So is this program only for people that own the video content? Can I have place my CTA message on someone else’s content?
I’m surprised YouTube is so behind the times with this. We’ve offered clickable video for months, both with a transparent menu and the actual objects in the video. It has offered us a lot of flexibility we are going to be expanding upon in the near future.
This can be a great step forward but certain has the potential to also dilute the level of user generated content on Youtube as marketers will now have even more of an incentive to flood the system with their videos.
In fact, the flooding of the system by marketers is in some way being encourage as this is a free addition to current advertisers.
so that’s what those were…i guess they need to make more money somehow. the ones i saw somehow stayed there the entire video…kinda annoying…
I think this is great, but would like more details on exact costs and how the users will be broken up into groups.
I agree that it would be nice if the ad popped up for a few seconds and then went away until the last 10 seconds of video.
So that’s what it’s called! A call-to-action-overlay. Well they may have only officially released it a week ago, but my video of Good Festival of Speed has had the Fratellis (sorry itunes) on a CTAO for many weeks.