Google Is Saved! YouTube Money Machine Mints $1 CPMs
alleyinsider.com
alleyinsider.com
no revenue, no money to pay them in case you get sued.
which is why YouTube LLC still exists independently.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/30/did-youtube-just-raise-... 35M daily videos watched = 1000M monthly videos watched monthly infrastructure cost was estimated to be 1M USD
Which means at 1$ CPM you are barely breaking even. And that is without any revenue sharing costs.
Perhaps Google had better economy of scale but I doubt its an order of magnitude better.
And if someone puts any ads on my family birthday videos I'll be irked.
Now, you aren't dealing with nearly the bandwidth costs...
The money-making potential of videos should be compared with televisions, not clicks.
One hour of YouTube time should eventually make about the same amount of money than one hour of TV, that's the future and that's its potential. The cost, of course, will be lower.
To achieve this, YouTube may need enterprise sales etc. But these are just means, the primary goal is still to get people spend time on online video.
What changes is the competitive landscape--when there are a billion videos to choose from, as opposed to 20 or 50 or even 100 found on broadcast or cable or satellite, the eyeballs on any one drop. Obviously the aggregator is the natural place to sell the ads (bully for Google), but the ability to focus efforts on "blockbuster" shows is a bit different. I worked in television for several years right out of college, and blockbusters are a major part of the operating budget of a TV station because it's a limited commodity--if you want to advertise during Lost, you've only got one company to buy from and there's only a couple dozen slots for sale. Cheaper spots are actually often more effective (since you can run them a lot more and get a single viewer to see your ad multiple times), but there's still magical thinking in TV advertising and advertisers like to reach the blockbuster audience. When the blockbuster no longer exists (as seems likely in a future of a billion+ possible videos), monetization will shake out differently. But advertising isn't going away, so something will happen and it'll all work out somehow.