YouTube Extends Its Revenue Sharing Program

Jason Kincaid submits:

Over a year and a half ago, YouTube launched a new Partner Program that allowed some of its most prolific and popular content owners to make some money from the content they contributed, inviting them to get a revenue share of ads placed against their videos. This was all well and good for YouTube’s cream of the crop, but let’s be honest — most of us don’t contribute all that regularly, and the vast majority of our videos don’t become popular, which means we couldn’t get into the program. What’s worse, even when one of your videos suddenly did go viral, if you weren’t already in the program there wasn’t anything you could do to reap the benefits. Today, that changes: YouTube is launching a new addition to its Partnership Program that will give anyone the chance to make some money when lightning strikes, even if it’s the first video they’ve ever uploaded.

Here’s how it works: YouTube will be monitoring its site for videos that quickly go viral, and will then reach out to the content uploader with an Email invitation to “Enable Revenue Sharing” on that video. If you choose to enable the feature, then YouTube will place ads against the video and will give you a cut, which gets paid into your Google AdSense account. YouTube’s criteria for joining the program are vague — the site plans to look at the number of views a video gets, its virality, and compliance with the site’s Terms of Service, but it has offered no concrete numbers.

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YouTube Gets Its Own Version of AdSense

Jason Kincaid submits:

Over the last few months, YouTube has made it clear that it’s keen on helping its premium content partners monetize as effectively as possible — and it’s obviously having some success doing it, with the number of monetized views increasing rapidly. Tuesday the site is launching a new feature that will give those monetization rates another boost: YouTube Promoted Video campaigns will now be able to appear on a video’s ‘watch’ page, turning the product into what’s effectively an ‘AdSense for YouTube’.

For those that aren’t familiar with the terminology YouTube uses to identify its pages and advertising products, here’s what that means. Up until now Promoted Video campaigns have been primarily shown on search result pages — I might run a campaign with “guitar” as a keyword, and when someone did a search for that term, my video would show up as a promoted result. In this sense, the program was quite similar to Google’s AdWords feature. Now, though, YouTube is going to begin showing Promoted Videos on the ‘Watch’ pages, where videos are actually shown alongside comments and related other content. Promoted videos that appear here will be matched with the content that’s already on the page, hence the AdSense comparison. Anyone running a promoted video campaign will be able to choose if they’d like to stick with the old product (displaying their video in search results) or on the Watch page.

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YouTube: Viral Wedding Videos Can Be Great for Advertising

Erick Schonfeld submits:

The conventional wisdom out there on Web video advertising is that most advertisers don’t want to risk being associated with user-generated videos (i.e., the vast bulk of videos on YouTube). It is only the professionally-produced stuff on portions of YouTube and Hulu and Blip.tv where the advertising dollars are going. This is the conventional wisdom because it is mostly true.

But YouTube wants to change advertiser’s minds (because the vast bulk of its videos are audience-produced, did we mention that?). So in a blog post Thursday, YouTube trots out a told-ya-so case study about the “JK Wedding Entrance Video” (embedded below) that has been spreading around like crazy. Since it was posted on July 19, it has been watched more than 12 million times. It’s even spawned its own (professionally-produced) faux sequel, the “JK Divorce Entrance Dance” (also embedded below).

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YouTube Is Monetizing at Least 12% of Views

Jason Kincaid submits:

Monday, YouTube posted an update to its Biz Blog in which it detailed and attempted to dispel some of the oft-spoken myths about the world’s most popular video portal. The blogosphere’s reception to the post was generally skeptical, with a number of reporters complaining that it was overly vague and lacking any concrete numbers about YouTube’s monetization efforts. But it seems that everyone missed a few nuggets of gold in that post that actually reveal quite a bit about YouTube’s performance. Like the fact that the site is likely monetizing at least 12% of all videos streamed in the United States — a huge jump over the numbers that had previously been reported.

You see, a little math and some reading between the lines reveals that things actually are going quite well for YouTube, even if the site isn’t willing to explicitly say so. Up until now, YouTube’s standard line about its monetized views has been that it was selling ads against “hundreds of millions of views each month”. But the post Monday had a subtle change: YouTube is now monetizing “hundreds of millions of views each week“. That one change is very significant, and given that the post was written by two members of YouTube’s PR team, you can be quite sure it was deliberately worded.

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YouTube’s Biz Blog Goes on Offensive, Says Industry Comments Are ‘Myths’

Dan Rayburn submits:

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Google / YouTube – Best M & A Ever?

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan submits:

Back in Fall of 2007, I published something called Top 10 Best Web M&As of All Time. The YouTube acquisition had just closed, so I said we’ll reserve judgment. At the time, we put News Corp.’s (NWSA) acquisition of MySpace at #1 for the simple reason that Google’s (GOOG) $900M search deal made it a slam dunk for #1. On that note, today you can argue that MySpace is less sexy than it was then… but who cares, it’s still a very accretive deal for News Corp.

Today we hear mumblings that YouTube isn’t just generating $500M in revenues but will soon be profitable.

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Google Moves to Show That YouTube Can Make Money

Larry Dignan (ZDNet) submits:

Google (GOOG) on its second quarter earnings call went out of its way to say it was pleased with YouTube’s “trajectory” and indicated that the company would make money on the video site. The motive: Combat a bevy of worries about YouTube’s profit potential.

YouTube monetization has become a hot issue among analysts following Google’s second quarter earnings report. Some like Bernstein’s Jeffrey Lindsay and Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster have talked YouTube implementing fees for uploads and all sorts of models. Fast Company call these fees a big awkward problem. Finding the business model for YouTube has become a bit of a parlor game these days. Munster reckons that YouTube will have $323 million in gross revenue in 2009, but that costs outstrip revenue. Munster writes:

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YouTube to Broadly Release Overlays, Allow Linking Out

Jason Kincaid submits:

Wednesday, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.

The product’s official name is the Call-To-Action Overlay, and it’s about as straightforward as ads come: it’s a semi-transparent pop-up that links viewers to any website you choose. For example, I could place an overlay on a TechCrunch video inviting users to visit the corresponding post we wrote about it. Yes, it’s that simple.

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YouTube Launches Reporters’ Center to Train Citizen Journalists

TechCrunch submits:

By Robin Wauters

Over the weekend, YouTube launched a new channel dubbed Reporters’ Center, which it hopes will prove to be a good way to educate existing and aspiring citizen journalists on how to report news in ‘the digital age’. The new resource will feature a host of top journalists and media experts sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting.

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YouTube Reports Exponential Growth: Issues Viral Video Challenge

Sam Diaz submits:

YouTube had been seeing astronomical growth of video uploads from mobile devices, up 1700 percent – yes, 1,700 – over the past six months. But since the launch of the iPhone 3GS last week, mobile video uploads increased by 400 percent a day, according to a post on You Tube’s blog.

So what’s driving this growth? Aside from the fact the more video-enabled phones are on the market today, YouTube also points to improvements to the “uploads flow” from a phone as well as the ability to upload and then instantly share among your social networks.

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