Alot of hubub has been going around that youtube is going to start running preroll ads and sharing that revenue with the content producers. Some people are thinking the reason for doing this is to get the volume of content necessary to get advertisers interested in producing their own video ads. This idea that you build the field and they will come, or in this case, you build a hundred thousand fields and they will come is wrong. Here is the fallacy of that logic just because you now have a hundred bajillion stupid videos of creepy guys without shirts on, doesn’t mean people are going to flock to make ads for you.
The real reason people are going to make video ads, and they definitely need to start looking at doing them, is the traffic. Buying youtube gets you the volume of views, not variety of them. Who cares if they have millions of videos. If they can serve up ads on the quality ones, they are golden. The real question is, how are you going to accurately target all those lonelygirl videos. Do I really want to see ads for buyowner homes or something along those line?
The big problem youtube/google is going to run into is revenue sharing for these thousands of individuals who upload copywritten content. OR are they really going to just pay out top tier videos? Anyway, we’ll see. I think I’d like to see adsense integrated into youtube videos as a postroll, similar to adbrite’s video network we talked about a few weeks ago.
