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Google has formally announced that it will begin trying ads on select YouTube videos. The way this will work, according to the announcement, is by having a short ad rise up from the bottom 20% of the video. The ad will have an X for you to close it out if you wish, and if not it will go away after it has played.

If you click on the ad, it will pause the video playing and play another short video in the middle of your video player. Once it has finished (or before if you don’t like what you see) you go back to your video. Clicking onto the ad video will also launch a new destination page for the advertiser, if you so choose. See some screen shots from the Linkin Park video below for an example:

On Click:

You can also see another example HERE - this one sheds a little more light on the relevancy factor, illustrating when these ads will actually show up. Of course with audio-to-text still not very good, relevancy will continue to be a question.

There are, of course, many people not too excited and a quick look at the comments on the blog post indicate that Youtube users are not really looking forward to this at all. But it will probably be a little longer before we see truly how everyone feels. The ads will only show up on YouTube content partners’ content for now (approximately 1,000 partners or so) and I’m sure won’t be rolled out entirely at once. But once users start to see them more, we’ll certainly see things showing up in the blogosphere about it.

I think it’s a step in the right direction. Others have been trying it - VideoEgg, for example, has tried something similar, as some have noted. However in YouTube this will certainly be the big stage for this all to play out on. In the Linkin Park example above, for instance, as the video is letterboxed the ad doesn’t actually interfere with any of the video’s content at all. Even in the Hairspray example, I’m really not bothered. And as someone who generally despises the approach of traditional advertising, I think that’s pretty impressive.

It’s understandable that your average YouTube user will not be too appreciative of the overall situation. While it is the truth, many folks probably won’t be thinking about the fact that Google put $1.6 billion dollars of investment into something that wasn’t making money and needs to find a way to change that. In fact, even though it is the almighty Google and they have a decent amount of cash to spare, if they cannot find acceptable ways to monetize YouTube it might not be long for this world. So while people may complain for now, I think “YouTube with ads” will be better for most than “no YouTube at all.” And this isn’t just for YouTube, it’s for all video sharing sites. There’s an awful lot of bandwidth being used up and someone has to pay for it.

Something has to be done in this space, so here we go. For me, the biggest questions will revolve around revenue sharing, copyright issues around ads and relevancy. I’m excited, should be interesting…

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