One of Google’s biggest goals this year was to make YouTube profitable. Well the year is nearly half over, and they’ve still yet to figure this puzzle out. Traffic and users is not the issue, but rather, how to convert them into cash in their pockets.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that it “seemed obvious” that they should be able to generate “significant amounts of money” from YouTube. But they’ve still not yet acmoplished this. Schmidt, however, remains optimistic. In the interview, he said that the site could lead to “the creation of a whole new industry,” and that his optimism was based on two facts: We know people are watching it” and “We have the luxury of time to invest.”
129 million people visit YouTube every month, and Google is hoping to expand into other types of web-based ads, including those that exploit the popularity of online videos.
Last month Google said they would soon be rolling out new types of video based advertising in an attempt to monetize YouTube. These are said to be different than the standard pre-roll and post-roll ads. Google has also tested out “in video” ads, whereby a banner appears along the top of the screen while the video is being played. The reaction to this, however, has been mixed.
