Innocence Lost: Google Begins Advertising on YouTube

How exactly the Internet would make money was something people wondered about it since the World Wide Web became widely publicly available. As might be expected, the adult entertainment industry was the first business to turn a prophet on the new media format and to the chagrin of many, it probably remains the most profitable industry on the Internet today. Programs such as Google's Adsense and retailers such as Amazon.com have learned how to make the Internet profitable for them, but Google's latest advertising attempt has some people abandoning the popular Youtube site in disgust.

The ads which are displayed at the bottom of a running video are typically less obtrusive than a commercial interrupting one of your favorite television programs, but during the experimental testing phases of the new advertising program video posters can not choose to have their submissions opted out of the new advertising program.

Google may be looking for a way to pay for its $1.6 billion dollar acquisition of the popular video site or may simply need a way to pay the lawyers required to defend against other companies suing the search engine giant over copyright infringement on Youtube. The advertising which is only experimental can be clicked off and has left some posers wondering if there is a way to let their videos make money. People who choose to participate in Youtube's new advertising program get to share the $20/1000 page views Google plans to charge advertisers.

Whether this will be a "hit" with certain people as Google's Adsense has become for serious Internet marketers or something that causes some users to turn away from less commercial video sites in disgust has yet to be seen. Advertising in Internet videos or using such videos to advertise other products will likely stay around for a while. Ideally, placing ads in the videos will not be forced on those who post and Google will not add a "premium subscription" service for those users who do not wish to be bother by them is as typical with many free web hosting places. For those who liked the ideal of Youtube, it seems the innocence of the site is lost and advertising their will become a way of the future. (Ideally, it will also let commercial companies post some of their older offerings to the site and have less worry about copyright infringement.)

Sources:

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