YouTube adds overlay ads
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Aug 22, 2007 at 2:25pm
Fans of Google’s YouTube are starting to react to overlay advertisements the company began testing on Wednesday. Some find them jarring, some in international quarters wish they could see them, and still others are wondering if they can make money off their own videos with these ads, notes CNET.
The ads appear at the bottom of a video shortly after the clip starts to play and disappear after 10 seconds. They resemble the TV-style ads that often feature the image of a celebrity walking onto the bottom of a TV screen for a few brief moments.
YouTube executives said Tuesday that extensive testing showed that viewers rejected any format that forced them to sit through a commercial prior to a clip being played, a process known as a preroll. Using overlays, the execs said, is the least intrusive way to get a message in front of their audience, “or so they believe,” adds CNET.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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Strages Says:
What Youtube are now experimenting with was inevitible. At what expense could it have kept running without any monetization model anyway? The users of Youtube will eventually realize this and have to accept the fact that the ads are there in their best interests which that is to keep receiving video content for free. It takes an immense amount of money to keep an engine such as Youtube running. Google itself was a classic exampe of this when it first came to market. The greatest product ever to land on the Internet which eventually needed some sort of advertising model to stay alive: Google Adwords and Adsense.
It is also interesting to note that there is another Internet company offering a similar solution, but more. Hyper MP Group have been working on a complete video presentation and advertising system that uses overlay ads from all exisiting advertising servers on the Internet. I think this is a better solution since it treats all videos and all advertising as the same. More impressive than other solutions out there. See for yourself. http://www.hypermpgroup.com/index-3.html.
Posted on August 24, 2007