My Idea For Monetizing YouTube

How would you monetize YouTube and all that delicious traffic? How would you monetize a video when it only lasts 1 to 3 minutes? Online video monetization, the holy grail of marketing…. queue exotic sounding Indiana Jones music….

So here is my idea! Build a backend that allows advertisers to interact with video creators as well as buy sponsorships of videos tagged with certain keywords or which have certain keywords in the video. So for a broad sponsorship advertising campaign an advertiser would login, choose the category/tag they wanted such as “Tech/iPhone” or input a trigger keyword such as “iphone”. Then the advertiser could choose how they wanted the ad to show, here are some possible choices:

1 to 3 second display at the beginning of the video of a static ad image.

Ad shown as a peel ad in the right corner.

1 to 3 second display of a static image shown at end of video.

1 to 3 text ads shown at end or beginning of video for 1 to 3 seconds.

Or sick text ads above and below the post recommended videos

So that would allow someone who is offering an iPhone unlocking service to advertise on any video that has “iPhone” in its content or is categorized as such. Pricing should work as paying per click.

Now in addition to this broad keyword triggered setup you also have a place where advertisers can buy video sponsorships from video authors before they go live. So a video author might upload their video they created, choose a category, describe the content and set a time for how long before it goes live. Then an advertiser would login and view pending videos to see what is available. Then for a flat rate set by the author of the video they could buy sponsorship of the video. Plus if you have a history of the person making the videos an advertiser can see how well their past videos have done and how many times something has gone viral. So in addition to all those options you also set a big payout if the video goes viral, so if the video is shown more than X times the video’s creator gets a bonus from the advertiser. Don’t you think that would work? Here is a hypothetical real world example:

Sam is a dude in a basement. He makes a video of his cat playing with his converse shoes in his basement. The cat is cute. Sam uploads the video and decides what the hell, I’ll leave it for a few days in the pending queue and see if someone wants to sponsor it $50 bucks and pay a bonus of $5,000 if its viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube. Matt at Zappos checks his email and has gotten an alert that a video tagged with “shoes” is pending at YouTube. He logs in and views the video, the cat is cute, he decides for $50 bucks they will sponsor the video and that if it goes viral its worth paying a bonus of $5,000. Sam gets notification and now has $50 bucks to buy stuff for his basement. The video goes live, the cat is cute, it is viewed 400,000 times. Same gets a $5,000 dollar bonus and Zappos gets excellent branding from their sponsorship with no risk.

This should also work for professional video creators as they can get paid more upfront and on the bonuses as well if they have a history of creating content that goes viral.

And for longer content, just copy Hulu and start a huge database of TV and movies that go back to the beginning of time. Google just needs to buy ABC or something and take all their long tail video content and put it online with advertising on it. For content that is twenty minutes to a few hours commercials are not a problem for most of us.