YouTube Promises Content Creators Control Over InVideo Ads

By now, you’ve likely heard or read about YouTube’s official debut of overlay advertisements, distributed by a system dubbed, appropriately enough, InVideo. If you’ve browsed the site quite a bit in the past few days, chances are you might have already seen one or two or more such spots presented in the new format.

If so, you might be wondering if you’ll be seeing a lot more of them as time passes. You might be wondering whether they’ll eventually be everywhere, inside every video found within the website’s servers. Fear not, that’ll never be the case. Probably not, anyway.

YouTube’s been getting quite a bit of negative feedback over the InVideo ads following their public introduction, which I suspect has most to do with the fact that they take up space in an already quite limited – some might say cramped – video window. Users don’t want to have things looking smaller still. So they complain when things do trend in that direction. (Ad relevance isn’t exactly something expertly tackled just yet, either, so odd matches no doubt do crop up now and again.) But InVideo ads, Google-YouTube have emphasized, will be almost entirely user controlled, so a future of an advertising overload on the Web’s most popular video portal isn’t likely to become a reality. In fact, I dare say it might even end up better than what we have today.

If you’re anything like me, you abhor adverts. For some time, they were tolerable, but there was a point at which we leaped past the point of critical mass and fell miserably into the realm of Way-Too-Frickin’-Many-Of-‘Em. Some sites today present a “tasteful” number. This very publication, like the New York Times, The Nation, MIT’s Technology Review, and a number of others, manages to do just that. But a great many simply get carried away.

What I suspect will happen with YouTube is that InVideo advertisements will gradually take the place of banners, columns and blocks of AdWords and such. And because users of the site can choose to keep InVideo ads from populating their clips, there may, in time, emerge pages with no ads whatsoever; users that wish to place ads in their videos, most certainly for moneymaking purposes, will be able to do so easily as well.

Eventually the InVideo system will be developed to the point at which Google will allow revenue sharing in the way it has for many years with its AdSense program.

Whether such a model proves lucrative enough to make the video host profitable, only time and further feedback from viewers will tell, but when you consider the fact that YouTube is all about video, it only makes sense to assume that the way in which it eventually makes money is to focus its advertising efforts on its core medium. And it’ll do so whilst keeping, and possibly even growing, its user base. How? Again, by putting the controls into the hands of its users. A happy customer is a return customer, after all.

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