If you haven’t noticed yet, YouTube has finally gotten around to a scalable business model with ads now appearing during some videos. The unobtrusive overlays reserve ten seconds of time 15 seconds into a clip. My favorite part of my source article was the findings of Google’s market research:
YouTube has spent months testing different ad formats … It found that viewers abandon videos that include pre-roll ads at a rate of more that 70%, so it ditched pre-roll commercials.
Pre-rolls are those nasty ads that you are forced to watch — in full — before accessing any content. 70% is a huge level of defection for a business model based on eyeballs!
Anyway, this move finally fulfills Google’s promise of revenue sharing for partners and produers. More importantly the revenue sharing play should also lessen the impact of the brand-name plantiffs argument in the upcoming court case alleging Google owes more than 1B for unauthorized distribution of their copywritten content.
[WSJ (link in a bit)]
