YouTube Rolls Out E-Commerce, Now You Can Buy...Pirated Music?
Google just announced the company's latest attempt to monetize YouTube - "click to buy" links that will appear below music videos. Music rights holders can also use YouTube's song-detection technology to, get this, put a link to buy a song under a video that uses that song without permission. That's crazy.
Eventually Google says it hopes to roll out e-commerce to support all kinds of industries, from music to movies to print to TV. TV, or course, knows how to sell advertisements; so even though TV is full of ads you still know you're there to watch video - not to go shopping. Such may not be the case with YouTube much longer, but maybe we all knew this day was coming - when YouTube was turned into the mall.
Fortunately, as you can see in the image below of an officially sanctioned video, the buttons are relatively small and unobtrusive. We are very curious to see how often people will actually click on them.
Exactly one year ago tomorrow, Google announced that YouTube videos would be offered inside of Adsense, something we thought was going to mean huge profits for the company. Apparently it hasn't, or else we'd have all heard about it in a press release.
Below: Overplayed, male-fetishized, wannabe-lesbian, mall-rat video with "click to buy" links at bottom.
Figuring out how to monetize YouTube is widely believed to be one of the biggest challenges Google faces, though in fact the $1.6 billion Google paid for YouTube was an all-stock deal and the hype of the buy alone raised Google's total stock value more than an additional $1.6 billion.
None the less, it's a huge property that the company obviously wants to monetize. We're not excited about seeing e-commerce links strewn all over YouTube, but if there's one bit of good news here it's that music sales will happen through both iTunes and the DRM-free Amazon.com. That way when you watch a cute video with someone lipsyncing, you can pay 99 cents and get that song yourself. Or, when you watch some pop-tart belt out the latest hit - you can buy that song for yourself. Instead of watching the video again or listening to it stream for free on MySpace Music.
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Wait what? This is strange.
great move...very curious to see the effect of this. We can assume a "sales driven by youtube stats" pr will appear shortly. UMG can probably utilize it the best.
If it helps to do away with Itunes annoying and anti-competitive practices then I am all for it. monetizing YouTube is all good and well until the law suits star for breach of copyright....
Google is a never-ending source of speculation and intrigue. I love that now I will have at least a couple of years to watch the lawsuits fly back and forth between the RIA, DRM and Google, and that issues of downloading digital content will get closer to being resolved for everyone.
I like that it's below the video and NOT in the way. Even if it's only 1% of the viewers that click the link and buy it. . .that's more than YouTube would have made without it.
I think this is an experiment in the right direction. If there can be no pirated contents in the future, a better way would be to sell streaming license (a right to view a Metallica music video more than once, for example). I am one of the YouTube rock music fans, and I sometimes feel sorry not paying anything to the musicians (and their co-workers) who worked hard to create the music and video.
The only good thing that might come out of this is the era of digital content.
Next up will be a link allowing you to speak to the video's author for a fee.
Well when I want to get good cheap DRM free music, I go to Gomusic.ru !! I go to Youtube to see videos not to buy music, so I am very curious as to see if this is going to work.
They are the best.