Google To Roll Out New Video Adverts On YouTube
San Francisco – Google Inc.’s top priority this year is to start generating revenue off its YouTube video-sharing site, shortly expects to launch new products for its video-sharing service in the next few months and sees reason for closer cooperation with Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said a TV interview on Thursday; that sent Google’s shares up 4.7 percent.
The search giant says it has still not had any “progression” that will allow it to generate cash from the video site. Schmidt has said making the video sharing site to make money is the Web search company’s top priority for the year. He did not give details of the products, however, and they are not even in initial, or beta, testing.
“Google has said it will establish new types of online advertisements in an endeavor to increase revenues at YouTube, the video-sharing website it owns.”
Schmidt said that the adverts — which will become visible while a person is viewing a video on YouTube — would be different from previous types of video-related advertising, which has tended to appear before or after a clip.
“We have latest ad products that are not pre-roll and post-roll,” Schmidt was quoted as saying at a conference in California, but he declined to give more details. “Think of them as ads that use the page around YouTube in interesting ways.”
“We are acting upon but have not yet in my view gotten a breakthrough around monetization,” Schmit said in a CNBC interview recently — adding together that the company had made its YouTube strategy a top priority for this year.
The new ads would be rolled out “over the next couple of months,” Schmidt said.
Interviewer Maria Bartiromo inquired what the timeframe for making money was, Google’s chief executive replied:
“We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they are new products. They are not announced,” Schmidt said, adding that such ads would be “much more participative, much more creative … much more interesting in and of themselves.”
At the company’s annual meeting of shareholders, Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated that YouTube and DoubleClick, an online advertising company acquired by Google earlier this year for $3.1 billion, are still small businesses compared with its core search and advertising business.
“They both have potential, but for it to be a sizable part of our revenue, you are going to have to wait at least a couple of years,” said Brin in response to a question about when those acquisitions would make a significant contribution to the company’s bottom line.
The greater part of the advertising that emerges on YouTube is in the form of display adverts — banners and panels arranged around the video screen. Many appear on the channels of so-called partners, such as BBC Worldwide, which have specific agreements with Google for placing adverts on their pages.
Google lets advertisers to select which category of video they would like their advert to appear alongside — entertainment, travel, news, politics etc. — what time of day it will appear and, in some cases, to what age of viewer it will be shown.
The company has also conduct trials with “in video” advertising, where a banner advert appears across the top of the screen while a video is played and a succession of text adverts are shown across the bottom — though the reaction to these among users has been mixed.
The latest adverts will go further than basic in-line advertising that YouTube already runs, Schmidt said. In-line ads are text ads that run along the bottom of YouTube videos.
“The experience of the viewer is paramount,” Google has said of its quest to find a successful formula for placing adverts alongside video content.
The Web search leader also enacted a big character in the takeover battle between Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo. During a two-week test, it sold search advertisements on rival Yahoo last month as part of Yahoo’s attempt to find an alternative option to Microsoft’s offer.
Schmidt said the trial run offered good reason for the companies to discuss cooperation, but there was no deal yet.
“We view the test as successful,” he told reporters before the Web Company’s annual meeting. “That is a good basis to talk to Yahoo some more.”
Plotting in a long term direction, Google is focusing on automate “the trillion-dollar industry that is advertising” and he said its push into the business software market would help it forge relationships with big corporate customers that last “20 or 30 or 40 years” and “will ultimately be very, very lucrative.”
Schmidt left open the aspect of further business association to Yahoo even as he criticized what he said were anti-competitive aspects of Microsoft Corp.’s possible acquisition of Yahoo.