I clicked to buy and I liked it.. Monetizing Youtube | Hacker News Reader

I clicked to buy and I liked it.. Monetizing Youtube

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27 pointsbrm14 comments

I think this is one of the most important areas to have innovation.

I think the part of Adwords is played down in the commentary (now becoming history), unfairly. Google created a great tool(s). Popular, useful, valuable. Their contribution t corporate culture is (on the whole) positive. But all that is dwarfed by the fact that they were able to find a way to create value for businesses. There are today many businesses from laundromats, mechanics & TV repairmen to online businesses to everything else that are either built with adwords at the bottom of the stack or adwords is a substantial leg.

In doing so they found a way to monetise spectacularly. I'm not saying we can expect that trick again, but more of the same (even if in much smaller slices) is needed.

The obvious area to explore first on video is linking ad-2-content in a more meaningful way.

The first thing to stop doing is taking painted buses as a role model.

Wasn't AdWords just a copy of Overture? From what I remember, they paid something like 3 million shares of stock to Yahoo (who had acquired Overture) for the right to use their patent.

Adsense was relatively "new" in a sense that anyone/any website could monetize with Adwords. Adwords not so much.

I disagree. The concepts may have been new or not. But Adwords (search) works. 50%+ of businesses can find a good use for it. It is useful to advertisers.

Adsense is still broken. But it is neither a good way for publishers to make money or a good way for advertisers to advertise. It still works because of scale. But it's not working yet.

Really? As a web publisher adsense has easily been my most effective way of monetizing my smaller sites. Obviously the affiliate market is much more lucrative for TicketStumbler though.

Maybe everything is broken along with it? I don't really have the expertise to know.

Overture made a big step (ppc). Adwords made another step. It's very possible they wouldn't be where they are without Overture. But Overture didn't take the process the whole way either.

Dynamic bidding based on click through rate. All sorts of little innovations to improve relevance. Training advertisers to focus on ROI (which conveniently is closely related to relevance). Introduction of specialist tools used by the most sophisticated advertisers on Overture & making them available to everyone (Conversion tracking, Analytics).

adwords is still innovating a bit at a time. It's slowed a bit though.

I'll be curious to see how much this brings in. It's impossible to tell how much of their overall traffic is music videos, because unlike the rest of their content, those tend to get replayed over and over, which messes up the counting. That's a lot of why music videos are all near the top all-time. (YouTube does do some stuff to not recount, so it's not 1:1, but it's clearly happening a lot.)

Now why did this take so long to happen?

What exactly has happened? This is more a tweak then anything.

But I think there are some issues with copyright etc. Once they're using the content of a video to sell something related to it, maybe they run into legal issues.

I doubt that is an issue, but now they can't claim that they just didn't know something or other was under copyright.

When Google bought YouTube, they paid the big content makers money specifically for the right to show those videos. Now most music videos there are uploaded legally by the content producers.

There would certainly be copyright issues if not for deals in place.

But does that mean they're sorted. People still use owned materials for their own little videos. People still upload snippets from tv shows (especially interviews). The content producers may be involved. But they are certainly not in control.

I don't know enough about copyrights to tell you that. To some extent I know you can use snippets in some situations. The Daily Show's entire existence depends on it.

I imagine they'll be extra careful when responding to takedown notices though.

This is the same model Songza is/was offering nearly 1 year ago.

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