I recently attended SAScon in Manchester – that’s the Search, Analytics and Social Media Conference – and while I was there, I listened to an interesting presentation by Bruce Daisley from YouTube.
Although it was supposed to be a fairly neutral look at the future of video on the internet, Bruce did a fairly slick sales job about YouTube and the expanding list of advertising opportunities on that site.
What struck me was how commercial the site is becoming, and at quite a rapid rate. Yes, I knew you could post your adverts on the site, but until Bruce’s presentation, I hadn’t realised that the possibilities went much beyond that. However, with my now slightly increased knowledge of the type of things on offer, here’s a quick summary of opportunities available to advertisers on YouTube:
You can purchase large homepage adverts for your brand
These cost big bucks but are potentially highly visible and impactful. For example, they have been used recently for big film release like Avatar. These slots can be bought and served up to accurately segmented audiences according to age, tastes, and so on.
There are search related adverts and videos
For example, if you type in ‘football’, the site will serve up your chosen advert or video in the prime position on the page – much like pay per click on Google. You can also buy links to your website via search – again, much like Google.
You can now embed and overlay adverts into premium video content
This is becoming more relevant with the growth of YouTube TV, which delivers increasingly high value entertainment content. Research suggests that attentiveness to adverts on YouTube is one and a half times that of TV ads – mainly because users opt in.
You can create your own brand channels
By choosing this option, you can customise your own pages and serve up all sorts of relevant content. It’s not cheap – there is a minimum investment of £30k – but there are cheaper ways of creating your own personalised channels at a fraction of the cost if you are prepared to do it yourself using their own build tools.
Research suggests that the use of internet video content is predicted to grow from 25% of internet traffic to 90% in the next few years, so investment in advertising and brand-related videos will no doubt increase accordingly.
With more and more advertising opportunities available on YouTube, they are going to have to tread very carefully so as not to over-commercialise the site and turn off the legions of followers who currently enjoy the fairly commercial-free space in order to share content. However, they are not alone; it’s a common conundrum for a host of social network sites that have been bought for hundreds of millions, and now have to deliver a significant return on their investment.
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