Online Advertising on YouTube - 5 Essential facts

Online social media is place where most of the online community now hangs out. YouTube is the earth's second most used site. It follows that this represents a huge opportunity for marketing, much like television did back the middle of the lastCentury. There are however some things to know when movinginto this space.
Here a 5 essential facts to understand about advertising on YouTube…

Fact 1:
YouTube is not restricted to short home movie type content. Thousands of premium content partners, from Disney to Sony to Universal Music, and fans can find 100's of full-length features and thousands of full-length TV series on YouTube. The world first of Joy Luck Club director Wayne Wang’s film, “The Princess of Nebraska,” was viewed 165,000+ times during the first 48 hours — the equivalent of landing the 15th spot on the Hollywood box office charts.

Fact 2:
YT videos are NOT grainy & of poor quality. Full HD videos are on YouTube, already more HD videos than any other video portal. Hundreds of thousands of HD videos are uploaded to the site every month, and tens of millions are viewed daily. Earlier this year, CNET’s WebWare called YT the best HD video service on the web.

Fact 3:
Traffic, growth, and uploads are good for YouTube’s bottom line. There’s been a lot of speculation lately about how much it costs to operate YouTube. With revenue estimates ranging from $120 million to $500 million, and costs on an equally large spectrum, it seems people can pick any number to fit any theory they have about this enterprise. The truth is that all the infrastructure is built from the ground up, which means models that use standard industry pricing are above the mark when it comes to bandwidth and similar costs. YT is at a point where online advertising growth is definitely good for the bottom line, not bad.

Fact 4:
Online advertisers are not scared of YouTube. Over 70% of Ad Age Top 100 marketers ran campaigns on YouTube last year. They’re promoted videos,overlays and bought the home page. Many are organizing competitions that encourage the uploading of user videos to their brand channels, or running advertising selectively on popular user partner material (see Carl’s Jr.). Advertisers just want control, so YT is continuing to develop tools and targeting products that give advertisers more control over where their ads appear on the site. More will follow on that front soon.

Fact 5:
YT is only monetizing 3-5% of the site. This oft-cited statistic is old and wrong, and continues to build much speculation. In my view, the percentage is of less importance than the total number of monetized views, and YT is now helping partners generate money from hundreds of millions of video views every week in the US (and billions across the globe), more than any other video web portal has total views. Monetized views have more than tripled in the past year, as they’re adding partner content very quickly.