Reports suggest that YouTube will soon begin letting big content providers sell ads on their content that appears on YouTube. This would be an interesting way to break legal tension between the hugely popular video site and the content owners who feel their copyright is being infringed upon when users upload it.
“Big media companies have always had a love-hate relationship with YouTube,” writes Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch. “They don’t know whether to sue YouTube for abetting copyright infringement or get in bed with it because it is the biggest Web video game in town. YouTube is trying to convince them that love is better than war by giving them a cut of advertising revenues from their videos that appear on YouTube, regardless of who put them there.”
This would no doubt only increase YouTube’s competitiveness with other video sites like Hulu, which has Fox and NBC behind it. With major content providers on YouTube’s team, they will have plenty of big-name content that people want to watch, and users will not have to worry about the content being pulled for copyright reasons.
“Big studio content reportedly accounts for only four percent of the videos on YouTube, and yet it generates the majority of YouTube’s advertising revenue,” says David Chartier at Ars Technica. “By allowing major partners to bring their own ads (while still taking a cut), the studios may finally warm up to bringing much more of their content to YouTube than the handful of TV shows and episodes launched last October.”
After so much waiting, it seems that YouTube is on its way to reaching the monetization potential it has lacked in previous years. In other recent YouTube monetization news, the site has expanded its eCommerce platform to 3 more countries.
