USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

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.