You will have probably read or heard about last week’s YouTube
announcement and official debut of embedded overlay advertisements.
This advert distribution video is appropriately called InVideo
but will it prove to be a successful endeavour?
If
you’ve browsed the site quite a bit in the past few days,
chances are
you might have already seen one or two or more such spots presented in
the new format.
If so, you might be wondering if you’ll be seeing a
lot more of them
as time passes. You might be wondering whether they’ll
eventually be
everywhere, inside every video found within the website’s
servers.
Fear
not, that’ll never be the case. Probably not, anyway.
Negative Feedback
YouTube has been getting quite
a bit of negative feedback
over the InVideo ads following their public introduction, which I
suspect has most to do with the fact that they take up space in an
already quite limited – some might say cramped –
video window.
Users
don’t want to have things looking smaller still. So they
complain when
things do trend in that direction. (Ad relevance isn’t
exactly
something expertly tackled just yet, either, so odd matches no doubt do
crop up now and again.)
But InVideo ads, Google-YouTube have
emphasized, will
be almost entirely user controlled,
so a future of an advertising overload on the Web’s most
popular video
portal isn’t likely to become a reality.
In fact, I dare say
it might
even end up better than what we have today.
If you’re anything like me, you abhor adverts. For
some time, they
were tolerable, but there was a point at which we leaped past the point
of critical mass and fell miserably into the realm of
Way Too Frickin’ Many-Of-‘Em.
Some sites today
present a “tasteful”
number. This very publication, like the New York Times, The Nation,
MIT’s Technology Review, and a number of others, manages to
do just
that. But a great many simply get carried away.
InVideo The New AdSense?
What I suspect will happen with YouTube is that InVideo
advertisements will gradually take the place of banners, columns and
blocks of AdWords and such.
And because users of the site can choose to
keep InVideo ads from populating their clips, there may, in time,
emerge pages with no ads whatsoever; users that wish to place ads in
their videos, most certainly for moneymaking purposes, will be able to
do so easily as well.
Eventually the InVideo system will be developed to the point
at
which Google will allow revenue sharing in the way it has for many
years with its AdSense program.
Whether such a model proves lucrative enough to make the video
host
profitable, only time and further feedback from viewers will tell.
When you consider the fact that YouTube is all about video,
it only
makes sense to assume that the way in which it eventually makes money
is to focus its advertising efforts on its core medium.
And
it’ll do so
whilst keeping, and possibly even growing, its user base. How? Again,
by putting the controls into the hands of its users. A happy customer
is a return customer, after all.
Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
