YouTube’s Head of Monetization Exits, Joins Cooliris
“Exodus of senior executive from Google continues.”
San Francisco – The executive supervising Google’s effort to generate ad revenue from its YouTube video-sharing service has now left the company to become the chief revenue officer of Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup Cooliris, the company said Tuesday.
The exodus of Shashi Seth, who spent the past 18 months as YouTube’s head of monetization, comes as Google prepares to roll out a series of new online video advertising products and services in 2008.
Seth established and oversaw a team of engineers that have developed new advertising formats on YouTube, including the new in-video ads that are becoming increasingly common on the site. Additional advertising products are expected from Google this year.
“I think part of being a Googler is that you like smaller environments, and I think Google got a little big for me,” says Seth. He was appointed as YouTube’s head of monetization in January 2007. It has been a thankless job.
Seth was selected to his position at YouTube in January 2007. It certainly was not the easiest job in the world, despite being the incredibly popular video-sharing web site; YouTube is still finding it hard to make money.
A recent report from Bernstein Research projected that YouTube will generate about $273m in revenue in 2008. Unnamed sources also say that the service has reached a tipping point for video advertising. Wall Street has closely watched Google’s efforts to drive online video advertising on YouTube, which would give the company a source of revenue that would complement its core search advertising business.
YouTube monetization is job No. 1 at Google, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has declared. Google is working on new YouTube ad options, and it recently added a YouTube buzz targeting option that lets advertisers place ads on videos that are gaining fast in popularity.
In his new job at the startup, which has raised some $3 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Seth is going to help develop a new business and advertising model.
Cooliris is already “headed in the right direction,” he says, and one of the most promising future applications would be a product search feature on sites like Nordstrom.com. A shopper could look up a particular type of shoe at the shopping site, and rather than clicking through page after page of search results, they could explore those results more fluidly with PicLens.
“Shashi was a valued member of both the Google and YouTube teams, and we wish him well in his new endeavors,” the company said in a statement. Asked about plans for his replacement, the company said, “We have a talented team leading our monetization efforts at YouTube and we are excited about the future.”
Seth is the latest in a series of high profile executives to depart from Google in recent months. The company, however, has argued it has a deep talent pool and has denied that it is suffering from a brain drain.
Seth said he wanted to return to a small, fast-paced startup environment and was taking a position as chief revenue officer of Cooliris, which makes an online 3D viewer.
Prior to managing YouTube’s revenue generation efforts, Shashi served as product lead for search at Google, where he was responsible for personalization and community efforts.