How To Get Overlayed
If you're a (Silcon) Valleywag like me, you might have pondered how Google will monetize YouTube and recoup that $1.7 Buh-illion purchase price. The answer, of course, is advertising. That is how the Googlenaut feeds its momentum, and it does it so well. Last year, YouTube generated close to $20M in advertising (and you didn't even notice, now did you?!).
But the next phase of Google-Oogley has begun: video overlays. Breaking out of the boring pre-roll, post-roll, interstitial model with which all those brilliant minds from the broadcast world have infected web video, YouTube's decided to try out using video overlays: 10 second overlays that occupy the bottom quarter of the screen. Big whale advertisers like Warner Music and New Line Cinema are already ponying up about two cents a click - that's NOT chump change when you're serving up the kinds of number of customers and video views as Google. Or Yahoo. Or My Space, even.
I'll be interested to watch how this "plays out."