YouTube Offers Advertising Platform

By: Jennifer Hong
Staff Writer
Published: Dec 12, 2008

YouTube first launched its advertising platform earlier this month. Google has been the primary owner of video social network for over two years now. The new advertising platform is a way for the company to profit from the $1.76 billion it paid for the Internet Web site.

Google Inc launched its new advertising channels to let companies run video advertisements on YouTube's search results. The platform is similar to Google Adsense and is only available in the United States.

"We are trying to blend the best of Google with the best of YouTube," said Matthew Liu, a YouTube product manager.

The advertiser can link their commercials to specific search words that are entered on YouTube. The video advertisements can be anything from selling merchandise to home improvement clips.

The new YouTube advertising platform is expected to attract video creators who desire larger audiences to view clips. The advertising search videos will appear under the "sponsored" column within the search results.

YouTube is the largest video sharing site in the world. The video Web site attracts more than 300 million users. The site also receives 13 hours of new video content every minute.

Google is also experimenting with new ads that could appear before, during and after produced TV shows and movies shown on YouTube.

Financial analysts predict that the new YouTube advertising platform will generate up to $200 million in revenue this year. Most analysts have high expectations for the video sharing site with revenue doubling by this time next year.