As the social media monkeys run in circles to crack the code on monetization, Google is doing the same with YouTube Inc. , to little or no avail.
Google acquired YouTube in 2006 and has still been unable to successfully monetize its content. According to The Wall Street Journal, "World-wide revenue from YouTube ads has fallen short of Google's expectations this year, and is likely to total about $200 million for the full year, according to two people familiar with the matter." The same article says Tim Armstrong, Google's head of advertising and commerce in North America, recently detected 105 problems with YouTube's ad sales.
It's that same sad story: Billions of users and massive traffic does not necessarily a bucket of money make. With all its videos and users, YouTube might look like a gold mine, but when it comes down to it, is there really any good way to monetize a couple thousand skateboarding cats? Maybe at a circus sideshow, but on YouTube it's all mainstream content – and not necessarily the best place for ads.
One current master plan in the works for YouTube is to start running pre-roll and post-roll ads in the third quarter of this year. These will, of course, be "relevant" to content. So, a skateboarding kitty may be paired with, say, a pre-roll for Iams, or knee pads. While a Crying Chris Crocker flick might be paired with a pre-roll for crisis counseling, or Creedmore. You get the point.
But surely there's got to be a better way. Pre- and post-rolls on the gazillions of YouTube videos aren't going to cut it. Nor are YouTube users going to put up with 30 second ads on short-form video. And what advertisers are going to want to have their brand names paired with the cradle of crazies mouthing off on YouTube, anyway?
If there's a better solution, though, Google – the king of all things advertising and money – ironically doesn't know what it is. And on top of being unable to monetize YouTube, it may well find itself eventually paying a boatload of royalties to the likes of Viacom for – whoopsie – selling ads against its copyrighted content.
IMO, YouTube is biggest disappointment of all. There is potential in advertising but it might be harder than anyone thinks. Schmidt's Ubiquity first, Revenue Later motto might come short. (Ok, we get it; you have a lot of users, now "show me the money")
The biggest problem I see with monetizing YouTube is around content. As long as they have crappy content, users wouldn't want to wait for a 20 second pre-roll of a 19 second video of a cat. And advertisers wouldn't want to advertise their products in a 23 second video from a cell phone of a 80-year-old man cursing. Or even worse, advertise an illegal video (let it be someone doing something illegal or a copyrighted video.)
"you may not like ads in the video as a user, but think from the
prespective of an investor or any one who can benefit from it then you
may have a different opinion"
As a user or an investor - taking away from usability doesn't sit well with me. Ads before/after media works fine in many scenarios such as at IMDB.com when viewing trailers - I don't think that will be good for youtube in all scenarios. Not that it shouldn't be applied, just applied well. Perhaps the social web filtering aspect will be able to differentiate which content to include or not to include ads.
I find homogenously adding ads to ALL videos on youtube will allow for a new youtube to emerge that is happy to generate $200 million per year w/o taking the route of embedded ads in all videos.
Instant Gratification.....doesn't merge well with Ubiquity first Revnue Later as Kaput will follow IMHO.
you may not like ads in the video as a user, but think from the prespective of an investor or any one who can benefit from it then you may have a different opinion
I dont have any measures or figures with me but I know that a local company in my country put ads in the game they were developing and it was a very good experience. Similarly, if you have seen English Premier League ( Soccer) then you must have seen that at the start of the match they insert some ads on the playground. I am not sure that whether I have conveyed the exact scenario but I feel very positive about it.
Do you have a 'standard of living' arrangement with Google in real life?
Youtube - ads with videos...I'm going to hate that. Really hate that. I think the fast serving of vids w/o delay is what is really attractive about youtube. Imagine a playlist with ads..sounds like a broken record/scratched cd/dvd/game. On second thought, that can be innovatively approached.
Just how bad is $200 million in annual revenue FROM ONLINE ADVERTISING?
Take away profits, just in revenue alone from online advertising, where does that put youtube? who else made more..cnet? msn.com? Yahoo? (I should have registered gazoo, gazooh, gahzoo....)
I think some of the projects have been included just to make the disappointments count reach 10
. Companies like google do a lot of things and every thing is not meant to generate revenue.Some things are just for experiment. Gmail is not a failure at all from any point of view. Youtube has not started making revnue but consider the potential of ads with in videos ( Google has been working on that direction) . Youtube is among the top 3-4 sites and the future seems to be very bright.
Orkut was the project of one of the employees of Google working on Orkut in his spare time.
Talk about culture , is there any other company that allows its employees to work on the project of their liking in their spare time
I dont deny that some initiatives of Google are failure but then what do you say about all the projects of the MS Live Labs
...Agreed, Gmail isn't really a failure from the user-standpoint, but what about revenue? Is the investment paying off?
As a gmail user, I do wish I could sort my inbox by the various fields (to, from, subject, date/time, etc.).
I know that "conversation" threads are kept together, and you can use the search feature, but often I want to simply batch my email tasks in different ways. Having the ability to sort the emails by these various headers would be helpful.
Drag and drop would be helpful. Copy / paste, always handy.
(one promise of Web 2.0 = making the web more "application-y")
I know, what should I expect for free?
I'm also appreciative of the mobile apps they've provided, extending their tools to my smartphone. (though I'd really like a "Tellme.com" type of search capability).
To some extent I think "Google Gravity" or - critical mass - has passed a tipping point where the broad scope and vast reach it has starts to inadvertantly (or ...adversly?) cause things around it to burn up in the "Google Atmosphere".
As the web becomes the platform, Microsoft looks almost "cured" of previous levels of world-swallowing assimilation, whereas Google is now looking pale-green, with bits of circuit board and tubing sprouting to the surface.
When something is everywhere - like kudzu - it is bound to draw criticism.
Youtube is just busting some zzzzz's right now. This is the only one(#9) that I have a PROBLEM with. What other MEDIA giant/network/mtv whatever - can boast the grip youtube has? It's the 'channel' of the future in my opinion. The $1.6 billion they spent and already made 1/8th of it back last year alone...( 105 advertising mistakes? shucks, not bad for a garage start up if ya ask me!! in what, 4 years? start counting to 200 million, I'll give you a head start, count in 100 increments-[referring to the dude that found 105 advertising mistakes]). :-)
I bet alot of 'independent' films may just debut (or has it?) on youtube.
YouTube Film Festival is next, upsetting Cannes and Sundance with turnouts and with REAL fans of the festival.
It's the People's channel. Did someone say 'People's choice awards' - ha give that one to YouTube.
YouTube will have a Hollywood star in about 5 years.
oh, also - YouTube just may be on your flat tube(television) in the short upcoming, picking off shows like 'America's funniest videos' and like for starters.
To all the Gmail champions out there (murugan, chuckgregory, natalies_mommy, etc.):
I can understand why you wouldn't think Gmail should be on this list. In comparison to the other 9 items, we think it's the best of the worst, which is why we ranked it at number 10.
I've been a Gmail user for some time now, and to me it's fine -- no better than fine, not usually worse than fine. But I certainly think it could be improved.
For instance, I have never been able to use Gmail to send large files -- this has been a huge pain for me personally.
I'm not wild about the Gmail method of archiving mail, either. Color-coding just doesn't quite do it for me.
Finally, I have a hard time giving Gmail much credit after Google so self-lovingly produced its own contest asking Gmail users to fawn over Gmail in a video. Whoever loves Gmail the most will win! Give me a break...
But Gmail does have some nice features -- Gchat being one of them.
It's not the worst, but I think it deserves some flack, particularly after yesterday's system-wide outage.
Well, I would like for you to know that I did a search for a singer plus album name and NONE of the results were relevant to what I was searching for in the first 2 pages. I had better results for this type of stuff (was looking for song titles from album) last decade.
I just may have a valid reason to contact Marissa Mayer.....or her assistant's assitant.
Did I post this in the wrong thread? I don't have my thinking cap on this morning. I didn't want to syndicate my thoughts via beta*Next-gen RSS enabled by the embedded nano-smart fibers. Alls you need is some aluminum foil covering the hat to disrupt that service btw.
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