Having experimented with a number of different types of advertising and settling on none in particular, Google is once again experimenting with pre-roll adverts that play before video clips. The difference this time is they’re skippable.
YouTube Revenue Vs Pageviews
Since buying YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, Google has tried to turn it into a moneymaking site. It’s certainly managed to take the site to the next level, with it now managing one billion page views a day, but the revenue still hasn’t come.
There’s been some debate over whether YouTube makes money, breaks even, or loses money every year but needless to say revenue needs to be upped in order for Google to make its money back. Especially as Google CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted the company paid $1 billion too much for the online video site.
Advertising Experiments
Google has experimented with a range of advertising options on YouTube. From huge one-off banner ads to overlay ads which remain through the course of a video. From pre-roll adverts before clips to post-roll after clips. None of which has been the magic bullet required.
YouTube now carries a range of advertising, with Google clearly deciding a scattergun approach for different videos and advertisers is the right path to follow. But the company still wants to fine-tune the experience.
Skippable Pre-Rolls
According to MediaPost, Google is now testing out skippable pre-roll advertising. The ads will run on carefully selected videos from content partners who have agreed to be a part of the experiment.
Google will collect data on when the ads are skipped, on what length and kind of video they are mostly skipped on, and the people most likely to skip an advert rather than watch in full.
The results of this experiment will then be used to formulate a new advertising model.
Conclusions
Pre-rolls are already used successfully on Hulu and other sites, but the YouTube crowd hasn’t really accepted them as of yet. Whether the option to skip ads that are too long or for uninteresting products makes a difference isn’t yet clear.
Either way Google will obtain data it can then use in the future to further fine-tune and develop its advertising model. The ultimate goal, of course, is to turn a profit and make the most of those one billion page views a day.
