Don Dodge from Microsoft asks, "Will video pages monetize? Google made a big bet on YouTube, paying $1.65 Billion for the consumer video aggregator. Will they be able to effectively sell advertisements against these video views? Or will it be junk traffic that advertisers are not interested in?"
The simple answer: Yes. A caveat: If done right.
Here's what I'd like to see: Low cost, targeted advertising, easy management. If someone posts a YouTube video on let's say the latest Tablet PC or UMPC, I'd like to be able to compete for an ad somewhere in the stream or on the border of the video for InkGestures whether the video is played on the YouTube site or the video is hosted in someone's blog.
Will a video-related ad have as much impact and return as a text-based, search ad? Most likely the video ads will be most useful for gaining exposure rather than producing a sale directly from the ad. If so, Google would do well to keep costs low. I hope they don't see video as an upstream opportunity. Sure, there will be higher-end advertisers that come from the broadcast world, which will be comfortable spending good sums of money to advertise online, however, one of the smart moves with Google ads at the beginning was to open them up to and make them more practical for more advertisers.
I'd also like to see Google come up with an ad infrastructure that allows video content other than that on YouTube. For example, if I have my own video blog, I might want to insert ads on it, and not submit the video to YouTube. Why? Because maybe I want to be the sole source of the content. Or the video is too long for YouTube or I want it in a higher quality than what YouTube provides.
One thing is for sure, the little advertisers are going to need better tools for developing video ads--if this is the direction things go. Windows MovieMaker doesn't have the right stuff at this point. iMovie on the Mac is a step above, but it's not there either. Professional packages are an option, but I don't see people going this route. Too expensive. Maybe Google will create an online tool to facilitate ad creation--lots of easy sharing of content, easy to use tools, huge stockpiles of 3rd party content at your fingertips. A good sound library (some free and some with revenue sharing back to the authors that Google manages) would be most useful, for instance.
Of course, text-only ads surrounding a video frame would be OK too. Maybe even preferable in some situations. Again, it all depends on how it's implemented.


Incremental Blogger