One-Off Viral Videos Now Can Make Money on YouTube
Posted on August 25, 2009 |
Ever since Google's YouTube video sharing unit started trying to make some serious money in late 2007, it has mainly tried to place ads on videos produced by people who regularly create popular videos. (It doesn't place ads on videos unless their creators specifically allow it.) Now that two-year-old YouTube Partner Program is being expanded to individual videos that suddenly become very popular--that go viral, as they say--whether it's the African safari animal faceoff in "Battle at Kruger" (with 45 million views to date) or cutesy videos like "Otters holding hands."
The move will open up YouTube monetization to tens of thousands of potential partners, up from thousands today, according to Tom Pickett, YouTube's director of online sales and operations. It's one more way Google hopes to make some money off its $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube, which hasn't produced significant revenue as quickly as Google and its investors have hoped. "This really opens up the door for more people to participate in the program," Pickett said today in a conference call with reporters.
Whether it pulls in the advertising will be another story. The ads will have to match the content pretty well, or they won't be effective. Both publishers and advertisers have often complained that contextual ads on AdSense sites don't always, well, fit the context. Two ads I just saw on Battle at Kruger were for a video game and a computer projector. UPDATE: I now see an African photo safari ad overlaid on the video itself, which I missed before. So I have to give YouTube props on that one. The display ad on the right is still the video game. But Google tells me not all the ads are contextual; some are demographically targeted.
Pickett didn't provide many specifics, such as how much revenue such videos might bring in. Some details from a post on the official Google blog:
