If you’re familiar with the Internet at all, you’ve most likely heard of YouTube. Heck, even television shows make references to it. Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’ve been on it a few times yourself. YouTube is changing how they feed us the ads of their sponsors. Having the ads stuffed down at the bottom is no longer working for them and they seem to think a new approach is needed. This brand new approach involves placing ads directly in whatever clip you’re trying to watch and giving you the option to watch a longer clip.
Oh wait, Hulu has already been doing this for months.
Personally, I believe this to be a step in a better direction for YouTube in terms of profit. As secure as investors felt before about placing ads with YouTube, they’ll feel even more secure in the fact that the user will have to take an active part to expedite the process of watching the clip/show they wanted to watch. Even if you choose to watch the smaller ads throughout the show, the user has to make notice of whatever ad is being placed there.
Frequenting Hulu quite often, when running into those ads, the longer ad at the beginning seems a lot more favorable than those interruptions while watching. According to TechCrunch, they won’t always be ads. Just someone who really wants their video to become viral. Really makes one wonder exactly how much something like that would even cost and how much people are out there with an excessive amount of spare change to throw around.
All in all, YouTube (and moreover Google) seems to be behind the times in terms of this little ad-dition to their site, but at least they’re taking a step in a better direction. If Hulu comes up with something more brilliant than this before Google does, I will be sorely disappointed. While I’m sure that users will be angry over this in the short term, people will quickly realize that if they’d like to keep it running, the site has to show some profitability or it’ll quickly go to the wayside and ask for donations.
And I’ve never seen those business models turn out well.
When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click), it can be difficult to tell which one is better for business. It’s a debate that has gone back and forth for some time, and the truth is, both are needed to have the biggest effect. But just because both are useful ways of advertising a business, doesn’t mean they are equally effective. With most businesses, SEO is the best way to get traffic to your website with PPC being a nice compliment, and that’s now becoming obvious to a bigger section of the business world.
A recent study by Hitwise shows the amount of traffic coming from PPC is decreasing, while the amount of traffic from organic search engine links is going up. This suggests that SEO is becoming more effective while PPC is becoming less-so. PPC isn’t dead yet, but if this trend continues, there will be little reason to pay search engines for traffic. Instead of paying search engines, it is becoming much more cost effective to hire an SEO company to get you ranked well in organic search results.
The data Hitwise used for their study compared traffic from the last four weeks to traffic from a year ago. The amount of searches being performed aren’t going down, but the amount of traffic coming from PPC is. While the reason why PPC traffic is decreasing could be attributed to a number of things, the fact that it is decreasing is really all that matters.
The fact is: PPC traffic is going down, the reasons don’t matter as much as the end result. If PPC traffic is going down, it doesn’t make much sense to invest in it over organic SEO. It’s becoming obvious that SEO is the wave of the future when considering how to go about Internet marketing, and those who jump on the bandwagon earlier will reap more rewards.
If you need a crash course in the differences and benefits of PPC versus SEO, the video below has interviews from some prominent professionals in both fields and has some valuable information for people who are looking to get a better grasp on both concepts.
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