Tech Town, NC

The ongoing YouTube experiment (financed by Google) continues as the buyer tries to find ways to monetize the content. Today, for the first time, I noticed a new sort of ad that appeared as a banner at the bottom of a video I was watching. The video happened to be one of the “promoted” videos suggested by YouTube, meaning that these are sponsored advertising.

As far as the actual ad goes it was fairly innocuous. If this is the way YouTube is going to be monteized going forward, then I take this as a good sign of something I could live with. I think this limited testing is a good move on Google’s part to see what might annoy users and turn them to competing sites like Grouper, Brightcove, or even Joost. From this limited test marketing though, it seems that the relvance will be the toughest thing to nail down, as I saw an ad for a kid’s movie during a yoga video…Not exactly sure what’s going on there. It could be a result of a fairly small sample size, but the relevance issue is definitely something to monitor as Google rolls this out more.