What chance does Google have of successfully monetizing YouTube? The pundits say little to none, but the company is forging ahead with its efforts regardless.
Google’s efforts to monetize YouTube have been well documented over the past year, as CEO Eric Schmidt tries to make the site pay back some of the $1.65 billion his company paid for it.
Issues To Overcome
Making money on YouTube is a complicated affair. There are the obvious copyright issues to take in to account which means only about 4% of the total videos can be advertised on, and then there is the even bigger problem of what types of advert to use.
Some people think the chances of Google ever making its investment in YouTube back are so slim that it should just kill the site off now. But while that may be an extreme view, it’s certainly true that traffic doesn’t always equate to revenue.
The Holy Grail
Schmidt has described monetizing YouTube as “the holy grail”, because if Google finds a way of doing it successfully then YouTube could potentially become the jewel in its overflowing crown.
We’ve already seen huge banner ads appearing on the YouTube homepage, but those aren’t going to pay the huge bandwidth bills and leave enough over for any fat cat bonuses, so the next stage of the plan has now been unveiled.
Pre and Post-Roll Adverts
Pre-roll and post-roll adverts were announced as being on their way back in July. And although the reception this idea got from YouTube regulars was hardly enthusiastic, the post-roll ads are now appearing.
NewTeeVee reports that the first post-roll ad proper has been spotted in the wild. They are for the TV series Sanctuary, and appear on a tiny percentage of the site’s videos.
Post-roll obviously means that they show up at the end of the video they are attached to, so it’s actually not that intrusive. They will also only play automatically if you haven’t already clicked an overlay ad during the preceding clip.
Conclusions
While post-rolls clearly aren’t as detested as pre-roll, which force you to watch the ad before the video will play, the roll-out does show that Google means business, and could mean that pre-roll and other forms of advertisement are just around the corner.
This seems to be the first step towards YouTube being a fully-fledged money-making part of Google’s impressive business. Whether the heavy advertising on the site will signal a loss in traffic will only be seen with time.
