AfterDawn: News

YouTube tapping Google customers for overlay ads

YouTube is finally trying to take advantage of parent Google's advertising experience to create a revenue stream through advertising.

Since buying YouTube last year, Google has been cautious about pushing advertising on viewers, although in order to make money, clearly some new form of revenue must be identified.



On Wednesday, YouTube will launch a way to link video clips with advertising it says makes sense contextually, with the aim of spurring viewers to seek more information.

Rather than load a commercial to the start or end of a clip, YouTube will introduce an animated Overlay across the bottom of its video player screen.

The overlaid ads will appear before the clip begins, giving the opportunity to click to watch an ad. If the viewer doesn't click on the link within 10 seconds it's supposed to simply disappear.

Source: Reuters

Written by: Rich Fiscus @ 22 Aug 2007 7:04

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• 7 comments

• 21Q

  I would prefer to have the commercial at the end of my clip, and not make it mandatory to watch. I don't want my clips to have an ad at the bottom of it at the begging of the screen. Some users will click the ad instead of watching the actual video. I don't think this will fly well.

  22.8.2007 07:25 #1

• Usfgeek

  People are gonna get pissed...

  22.8.2007 11:17 #2

• c1c

  We all saw this coming a while ago. If a clip is on your standard non cable network, then it is free to everyone. You get 22 minutes of show and 8 minutes are commercials.
  
  How can you watch a show without commercials on the internet, advertisers need to get their monies worth. If you know what you want to watch then YouTube is good. If you want to browse some of best of what the web has to offer, I suggest Stumble Video plugin for Firefox.

  22.8.2007 14:28 #3

• ShoeBark

  This is highly undesirable.

  22.8.2007 14:37 #4

• Unfocused

  Originally posted by 21Q: I would prefer to have the commercial at the end of my clip, and not make it mandatory to watch. I don't want my clips to have an ad at the bottom of it at the begging of the screen. They don't care what you or any other user thinks. If they did, there would be no ads anywhere. Putting the ad on the end of the clip just means that you would hit stop after the clip and never see the commercial to begin with.
  
  At least by them putting the ads in the beginning, you are kind of forced to watch it. If they really wanted to force the ads upon you, they should do like the porn sites and buffer the ads first, then buffer the clip that way you can't skip past anything.

  22.8.2007 18:25 #5

• maryjayne

  I am fine with this type of advertising as long as when I download the clip to my harddrive the ads are not downloaded as well. The time the ad displays is only 10 seconds which is much less than watching the full commercial at the beginning of a clip.
  Of course no advertising is better!
  
  I knew they would eventually get rid of advertising at the end of clips since the viewer can simply choose not to watch the clip at the end.
  
  Banner ads are just ignored and are actually quite annoying if they are full of motion or flash randomly, especially when I am trying to read an article.

  23.8.2007 06:17 #6

• borhan9

  Well this is nothing really cause Google and Youtube are the one and the same now.

  28.8.2007 04:36 #7