Google and YouTubeRaquel Peters

YouTube vs. Boob Tube

Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for You Tube. Google realized what we all already knew. People want to share and create content online. You Tube gets 65,000 uploads a day.

TV advertising was broken and You Tube could be a reallocation of the $67 billion advertisers spent on TV ads.

Google would need and believes they can have

•A business model to convert the site into an advertising medium

•A big change in the worldwide media economy. they now have revenue of $9.3 billion.

Until just now content was produced by Hollywood, on TV and bandwidth cost were prohibitive for videos to be watched online. Jeff Jarvis says, “The line between TV and Internet TV is about to disappear.”

YouTube started with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen who wanted something like Flickr for sharing videos. They started in a garage in California and created a way to embed videos on other sites

Hurley wanted to make a business out of “monkeyvison.” he went to New York to convince advertisers to give him money to broadcast themselves.

Problem

They had been, but it was a series of ruin. Advertisers were fleeing, show quality declining down a spiral. CBS tried to cultivate new online distribution channels by putting premiers of heroes, and Studio 60 online and the CW put Everybody Hates Chris and others online.

They think people will watch more online, but it hurts local affiliates who make money by selling commercial space within network programs, Internet bypasses them.

The old model was collapsing, online is the new era.

Before the YouTube acquisition Google video was trying to find a way to target ads to relevant content. In one approach posters were asked to close caption their videos using a Google tool, and the text was searched for metadata.

They have the audience, but now they need to create a revenue model, which Is hard with a user generated media.

Problem

Where to put ads. Before the acquisition, YouTube refused to sell ads appended to either end of a video to safeguard the viewer experience. Thy don’t want to be intrusive. Who is to say they will watch the ad, so the only space available is adjacent to the video window, which is good for the host, but a lot of the videos are posted other places like MySpace and not on the homepage.

Monetize them, but won’t

1. Advertisers can wait until their ads make it on YouTube and hope they go viral, which YouTube encourages as long as a free post is accompanied by a paid one. YouTude doesn’t make money.

The next big issue, is protecting intellectual property. Hard to control people posting material that they don’t own. Revver example

You Tube has been relying on safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to insulate itself from liability. Take videos off, ask for cooperation

Rumors that copyright holders were waiting for someone like Google to acquire YouTube for lawsuits.

Google made deals with various companies to detect copyright material and remove it if necessary

Risks

Advertisers may not be willing to risk putting ads on YouTube and associating themselves with violence, pornography, hate speech etc. meow mix example and few AdWords

Uploaders have done a good job at policing their own space, but the bottom line is they cannot control content on their site.

Basically, everyone wants to see what everyone else is doing, seeing and enjoying, something to talk about. They can email links easily, and were in a time of people wanting a shared cultural context, people like things they can discuss, which Is why YouTube will survive.

How Google Should Monetize YouTube With AdWords and

AdSense

•Since the acquisition, Its not just as simple as Google slapping an AdSense ad unit on the page, and YouTube has tried this in the past.

•Google began experimenting with video ads and has done a lot to promote them, for advertisers to begin using them in their ad campaigns as well as publishers, encouraging them to use video ad friendly ad unit sizes and enabling image ads. They have a lot of videos running on the AdSense network, but they haven’t said how much.

•The most obvious approach for video ads is what they experimented with in the their MTV video ad beta-inserting paid commercials with the streaming video. They were 30 seconds and many for branding purposes. The user wouldn’t have to click on them. This could be done on YouTube, at the beginning of short pieces or during commercial breaks.

ProblemSince YouTube videos are ad free, they could alienate the views by suddenly putting 30 second ads at the begging of every video. Shorter ads may work however.

Advertising Solutions

1. Advertisers could pick which videos they wanted their ads to appear on, which would leave the majority of videos ads free. This would be good if the video went viral.

2. Google could offer the ability for advertisers to pay for better placement of certain types of videos, such as infomercials or longer length commercials about their product or service for better exposure. Could be similar to the sponsored listings versus the organic listings in the regular Google search results, but with videos.

3. For non-video ads, Google could supply contextually targeted ads based on keywords added by members when they upload the video, but YouTube is also filled with keyword spam, where members stuff a huge amount of keywords into their video descriptions so they show up for terms the video has nothing about.

4. It would be beneficial if advertisers could site target their specific text-ads to appear on specific video pages, or for specific video search results that would target YouTube only, instead of the entire Google or content network.

-Snowboard company targets just YouTube visitors who search for snowboarding videos by keyword, having the only appear on YouTube.

5. Google could allow publishers to monetize from YouTube videos they post to their blog or website.

6. An alternative is to allow those who upload original videos to YouTube, to use their publisher ID to make money when someone views their video right on YouTube. Someone could go on an upload binge.

Problems•People uploading content they don’t have permission to upload, whether it be clips from a favorite show or an illegal recording from a concert or movie in the theater. Hard to control.

•If someone uploads a naughty video and puts it on YouTube and an advertiser finds his video ad playing at the beginning of the latest celebrity sex tape, it’s possible even with the flagging system, but its not practical to have someone review all the videos on YouTube

•Overall the acquisition could push Google’s AdWords video ads to the next level, in a way that publishes, advertisers, and Google make money.

A Look Ahead at Google and YouTube

•Google and YouTube remain separate entities after the acquisition and they continue to play their own individual strengths, Google's being search and innovating, YouTube’s being a leading content destination with a base of users who create watch and share videos.

•Google search results already contain links to content that’s hosted on YouTube, and YouTube video results appear in the Google Video search index. Once a user clicks the link they are taken to YouTube.com to watch the video.

•Soon Google video will be so comprehensive, a user can search a video regardless of where it may be hosted.

•People want images, videos, websites from the search results.

•Google supports YouTube by providing access to search and monetization platforms. Google works with a wide set of content providers, grouping together high quality video content from providers with high quality ads offering them as play lists which publishes can select from and display on their AdSense sites,

This is all Google’s continuing way to give the highest quality search results possible.