Sooner or later it had to happen... This week YouTube began testing an advertising format that overlays 10 to 15 seconds of video across any video that a viewer selects. YouTube's Flash-based mini commercials appear at the bottom of a video are semi-transparent and clear after the ad has run its course. Clicking on the ad takes the user to a player within the player where they can interact with the advertiser's content. One they click out of the ad, the video picks up where it left off playing.
The format has quite a few advantages for YouTube. Firstly, it is unavoidable - if you want to see the video, then it's going to run. Secondly, it's obviously richer than your average Adwords placement, so it offers a real branding advantage to advertisers. Thirdly it offers a cost effective and measurable new route for advertisers to get their message out to a targeted audience.
As a user of YouTube, I'm not sure whether I'm going to like this level of intrusion, but from the marketeer's point of view, I can't wait to try out the new format to see if it is effective in reaching my target audiences. If YouTube get this right, then they could be setting a course for the future of TV-style advertising. If the targeting's poor, however, there is a risk that they will lose both users and potential advertisers. At the end of the day though, they aren't a charity - their media partnerships, litigation andrunning costs meant that they had to start raising revenue at some stage - this could turn out to be a neat way of addressing that challenge...
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