In another of the recentefforts at increasing revenue from the site, Google’s YouTube has announced on both the official Google blog and the official YouTube blog the debut of click-to-buy options on videos.
When you view a YouTube video with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from YouTube users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. Or when users watch the trailer for an upcoming video game, they want to know when it will be released and where they can buy it.
Today, we’re taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding “click-to-buy” links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos. Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs and video games — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.
An example of these buttons can be seen below the clip here on a screen cap from the site;
YouTube has begun experimenting with a different angle on post-roll adverts. As we posted a while back, videos that have adverts enabled currently have optional overlay videos that would pause the clip you are watching and play an advert video before taking you back to the place where you left off - a feature that was only kicked in if a user clicked a button to play the promotional video.
The difference now is that at the end of the clip, regardless of choice, a video clip related to the optional overlays will play automatically. I first read about this on Epicenter on the Wired blog network who had this to say;
This may seem to contradict Google’s justification of overlay ads earlier this summer when they said that 75 percent of their viewers were dissatisfied with pre- and post-roll ads, but it looks more like a simple way to get a few eyeballs at otherwise ignored content. The new ads still only run on a small portion of videos, and even if the drop off rate is high, if a few people hang on to watch the previously promo’d ad at the end, it’s still more viewers than would have seen the ads otherwise.
As reported on Google’s official Mobile Blog, the company has started trialing ads for the mobile version of YouTube.
You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the U.S. and Japan. This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube — it will give you a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising. Our test advertisers will also have an additional branding tool at their disposal and the opportunity to reach the millions of people who visit YouTube every day on their phones.
Google has been trying desperately to uncover a successful revenue model for YouTube since purchasing the company back in October 2006. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has been quoted in the press as saying finding the right form of advertising on YouTube is the “holy grail”, and this represents another step in the quest to tap the potential of YouTube’s billions of monthly page views.
Access to Google owned YouTube was cut off on Sunday in China due to the uploading of graphic images and videos from Tibet, where trucks were pictured burning and monks were getting drafted through the streets by Chinese soldiers.
Blocking Western based websites is quite normal for China, where the government has always controlled the flow of information amongst its residents.
I came across a great little clip from YouTube in a post on Exposedseo.com in which a rapstar in the making by the name of Poetic Prophet raps about the basics of starting a PPC campaign. Very entertaining and educational also - check it out below;
The government of Pakistan inadvertently caused the majority of the world to lose access to the popular video sharing site YouTube for up to several hours on Sunday, after a botched attempt to block the site from being accessed by its own residents. The problem occurred because the government ordered a Pakistani telecommunications company, amongst 70 others), to route YouTube traffic into a black hole - i.e. trying to load a page or video from the site would be as if the site itself did not exist. The reason behind the directive was not clearly specified but it believed to be concerning a movie trailer for an upcoming release that is quite controversial in regards to Islam. (more…)
Google’s video sharing website YouTube which currently runs on just a few mobile phone handsets is reportedly expanding this service to a far wider audience by enabling it on phones from Motorola, LG Electronics, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson. The move will enable millions more potential viewers and offers the same experience as browsing the site on a normal desktop computer. (more…)
As posted on The Hollywood Reporter Google’s YouTube has announced that it is expanding its Partners Program, a project first launched in May that lets users who upload videos to the site share in revenue created from their content.
The service, that monetises videos through semi-transparent overlay ads and banner ads, was invite only for the first few months but is now open to any user in Canada or the U.S. A bummer for us Aussies, however the size of the program has reportedly doubled since inception with the number of monetised videos growing by 10 times its original size which means the project is growing rapidly and should reach our shores soon enough.
