YouTube Monetizes Embeds
In an attempt to capitalize on traffic that happens off the main site, YouTube today announced a monetization program for embedded videos at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco.
With an audience of 280 million viewers worldwide every month, and 44 percent of viewers watching videos on sites other than YouTube, a new revenue channel makes a lot of sense - for Google as well as its partners.
YouTube has been working on replicating the YouTube experience on other sites and this is a smart move given the consumption of online video is rapidly increasing worldwide; people want to watch video anywhere, anytime, on any device - not just on the YouTube homepage.
While YouTube added Adsense recently, with embeds, comes a different form of advertising; you can now control annotations, look at captions, and even search for other videos directly, regardless on where they are posted.
How does it work?
Advertisements appear on the bottom 20 percent of the screen (see image below) and last for about ten seconds, apparently the time recommended for maximum engagement. You can see it in action on Lisa Nova Live.
Image: Monetized YouTube embeds on Lisa Nova site
An interesting function that they've included is the ability to scroll though advertisements, and while we're not quite sure who would want to do that advertisers seem keen: you can now click through directly to the advertisers site.
Google certainly seems to be making an effort to monetize YouTube; adding Adsense yesterday, monetized embeds today, you have to wonder what's coming tomorrow.
What do you think?
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How about videos through the API? Does this go for that too?
Whatever makes Google take back the investment made in buying Youtube is worth the efforts.
What's not been said yet is how this affects all of the people using YouTube to serve their sales pitches. It sounds like affiliate marketers might be ripe for a service that lets you control every aspect of your marketing video (and audio like TalkingSpeaker.com). Any takers? ;) ;)
People talk a lot about using technology in schools and whine about how much filtering goes on, and then come up with ideas which are great for business but render many of these tools useless for educators. Unless they have some sort of "opt out" option when you embed a video, like they have for related videos, Youtube is going to be banned from the online commnunity I have for the students at my school, because these "auto-generated" ads are blind to age ranges.
This will help Google to get revenue from you tube .
:O YOUTUBE RULZ AND ADSENSE RULZ
I wonder if the advertising can be customized to the video. For instance, a video showing a political candidate should not have an ad for an opposing candidate.