YouTube gets advertising religion: Google ad machine converts advertising averse YouTube

YouTube’s submission to the Google juggernaut (see Google buys YouTube on the ‘cheap’: $1.65 billion in Google stock") has a dramatic irony at its core: an online property averse to placing ads at its own Web site was wooed by the online property with the mission to put ads on every Web site!

YouTube on third-party advertising at YouTube

In a May Fortune magazine interview Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, Co-founders, YouTube, spoke about the delicate nature of an advertising based monetization strategy for YouTube:

Hurley: We’re going to sell sponsorships and direct advertisements. But we are building a community, and we don’t want to bombard people with advertising.

Chen: If we wanted to, we could instantly turn this into $10 million in revenue per month by running pre-rolls [short video ads] on the videos. But at the same time, we’re going to make sure that whatever revenue model we’ve built is going to be something that’s accepted by the users.

MercuryNews quoted Julie Supan, YouTube’s senior director of marketing, in July’s “How will YouTube make money?”:

It’s not just a matter of whether or not the advertiser will find value. It’s also whether the users find value in it.‘ Don’t expect YouTube to embed commercials at the start or end of videos, she said. `We don’t think those things will be in line with our community.’

Google on placing Google advertising products everywhere

Eric Schmidt, CEO, at Q2 earnings conference call:

ultimately our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network

Tim Armstrong, VP Advertising Sales, at NYC Googleplex opening earlier this month, as cited by clickz:

Our main wish is that we're able to leverage Madison Avenue combined with Silicon Valley to create the largest advertising platform in the world. 

YouTube and Google on advertising at YouTube

Joint Google-YouTube conference call yesterday, as quoted by the Chicago Tribune and MarketWatch:

'I expect it will be a great channel for advertising,' Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, said. Google said it could insert ads inside the videos as well as serve up text-based ads based on a more robust video search function on YouTube.

 

YouTube's Hurley said that it was Google's "revolutionary ad program that inspired us."