More on how YouTube will try to make more money
Earlier this week, I wrote about the differences between what Hulu and YouTube are doing (stemming from Mark Cuban’s assertion that Hulu is kicking YouTube’s ass).
Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee reports on YouTube CEO Chad Hurley’s comments at a tech startup dinner in Palo Alto, which reveals where the video giant may be headed.
“Brand display ads will be ‘the primary driver of monetization for video,’” says Hurley. Which I suppose we can translate to mean that YouTube will try to make the most out of its deals with approved content creators, because it’s hard to imagine that brands will want to get placed with user generated videos that could be about… anything at all.
We also learn that affiliate deals – getting people to click over to iTunes or Amazon to buy stuff – will be in the mix. In my view this has got to be peripheral and not central to YouTube’s strategy.
And finally, there’s the possibility that people will be able to click products within videos themselves. This appears to be far off in terms of actual implementation, so I don’t think it will play seriously into the equation for quite some time.
Overall I get the feeling that YouTube is in the same position of everyone else, except with the unique problem/challenges that they have a galaxy of inventory to fill, much of which is unreviewed user generated video. Their strategy, you’d think, is to create as many partnerships as possible with high quality content producers, promote the hell out of those videos on YouTube, and then try to push CPMs on banner ads and preroll for those pages and videos as high as possible.
