Over the last few months, YouTube has made it clear that it’s keen on helping its premium content partners monetize as effectively as possible — and it’s obviously having some success doing it, with the number of monetized views increasing rapidly. Today the site is launching a new feature that will give those monetization rates another boost: YouTube Promoted Video campaigns will now be able to appear on a video’s ‘watch’ page, turning the product into what’s effectively an ‘AdSense for YouTube’.
For those that aren’t famililar with the terminology YouTube uses to identify its pages and advertising products, here’s what that means. Up until now Promoted Video campaigns have been primarily shown on search result pages — I might run a campaign with “guitar” as a keyword, and when someone did a search for that term, my video would show up as a promoted result. In this sense, the program was quite similar to Google’s AdWords feature. Today, though, YouTube is going to begin showing Promoted Videos on the ‘Watch’ pages, where videos are actually shown alongside comments and related other content. Promoted videos that appear here will be matched with the content that’s already on the page, hence the AdSense comparison. Anyone running a promoted video campaign will be able to choose if they’d like to stick with the old product (displaying their video in search results) or on the Watch page.
Premium content partners will also benefit from the product — whenever a Promoted Video is matched against a piece of content they own (or that they’ve identified using Content ID), they’ll get a cut of the revenue as well.
I spoke with YouTube Product Manager Matthew Liu, who says that the addition is part of YouTube’s overarching goal of increasing the amount of money its partners can generate (the more money they make, the more content they put up — and YouTube makes more money in turn). Before now, the site has done this in a few ways: it makes it easier for partners to monetize more videos with Content ID, which lets them monetize UGC, and highlights parter content as Featured Videos, which drive more traffic by heavily promoting the videos to YouTube users. And, obviously, today’s release will let them earn revenue through yet another channel as users begin running Promoted Video campaigns against their premium content.
See the YouTube Biz blog for more.
they want to squeeze some bucks from their users
this article is not useful for anyone except youtubes handful (about 100) partners.
It’s a nice feature for advertisers, but calling out the video by highlighting in yellow kills it — they should keep the grey color they use for featured videos and just change the text to “Sponsored Video”.
one thing i would like to see is youtube showing ads at the end of videos. i believe this would be very effective (let alone, least annoying). i don’t think they should treat videos just like text – people are concentrated on the video while on youtube, not on the page.
Ads before the video make sense. No one, not even Hulu, has an ad at the end of the video. Users will change the page as soon as their content has ended, making ads at the end of the video extremely ineffective.
i was not thinking of video ads, but simple adsense ads. i agree video ads at the end are just too easy to skip, but i do see a point to be prompted to buy, say a laptop after i ‘ve just watched a laptop review
Adsense for Youtube feature added the sugar in the cup of Coffee (Content Publishers).
Advertisers are also excited with this feature,I mean more brand visibility.
“Promoted videos that appear here will be matched with the content that’s already on the page, hence the AdSense comparison.”
I would still compare it to adwords instead of adsense. adsense is for website owners. adwords is for advertisers.
adwords displays ads in search, but also on other people’s websites.
Now that is a cool feature!
That’s nice but i saw some great advertising tricks on chinese video sites!!!
As long as the ads don’t block the actual video screen, I don’t mind. It’s when they look like part of the video that the ads become really annoying.
Video ads played before or after the actual YouTube video is fine, too.
At least this one doesn’t appear intrusive to the user experience. I doubt users will care much, and Google will be able to milk more profit out of Youtube.
duh. this feature has been in use for a long time.
Good report and analysis on a topic related to monetizing new media. Articles like these are why I still read TechCrunch, despite all the Twitter cheerleading.
this should help with the advertising revenue
It’s a nice feature for advertisers, but calling out the video by highlighting in yellow kills it — they should keep the grey color they use for featured videos and just change the text to “Sponsored Video”.
very intersting post a must read i allso will come back to read more
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