It looks as if the boys and girls at Google are giving video bloggers another way to monetize their weblogs.
YouTube has just announced that they will be partnering with a “few lucky users” in order to experiment with a new form of advertising within the video itself. Called InVideo Ads, this new feature will allow users producing original content to make money on YouTube’s domain, as well as on their own blog.
(YouTube Blog) So what’s new? Today we’re offering select partners the ability to incorporate YouTube InVideo ads into their content. These are animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you’re interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you’re in full control of your YouTube experience.
InVideo Ads, combined with YouTube’s profit sharing program should help motivate bloggers to not only upload original content on Google’s servers, but inspire them to create more of it for the masses.
While Google’s other competitors seem to be focusing on adding more “geek features” to their video arsenal, YouTube seems to be finding new ways of helping users “pay their bills,” insuring its future dominance in the world wide web (at least in version 2.0).
Author: Darnell Clayton
Darnell Clayton is a geek who discovered blogging long before he heard of the word “blog” (he called them “web journals” then).
When he is not tweeting, friendfeeding, or blogging about space, he enjoys running, reading and describing himself in third person.
I think video bloggers could also have been using Youtube to monetize by directly displaying advertiser info on the video. Yes, of course the visitor may not directly click to the advertiser’s URL, but it does cut the middle-man commission that you need to pay to Google.