According to the NewMediaAge article, commercial broadcaster ITV lost an estimated £1.3m in ad revenues because no ad deal was in place for the popular Britain’s Got Talent content. Susan Boyle’s performance generated more than 85 million video views on YouTube (more than 70 million on this video alone, for which embedding has been disabled!?).

In the regular partnership agreement, Google is responsible for ad sales and media owners get a share of the revenues (typically 50-60%). Since these media owners know their content best, they are ideally positioned to sell such positions. One can imagine that referring clients to Google for buying such inventory is not preferred.

Many media owners use YouTube to either syndicate their content (in full or in part) or use it as a video platform to host and subsequently embed content from YouTube on their own site. With syndication, YouTube may simply enlarge ad inventory: “We sell out of our video-on-demand space so this would be additional space to sell,” an ITV source was quoted on NewMediaAge. With embedded content, having control over who advertises around the content increases overall value of advertising packages, which then includes in-video or pre-roll. Moreover, it extends reach as videos are both featured on YouTube and embedded on the media site.

The missing link

For somewhat different reasons, advertisers that own and operate a brand channel on YouTube, want control over their videos as well. Driving traffic towards selected sites is what is missing in the brand channel proposition today. In my recent post with 7 tips for better business on YouTube, the number two suggested improvement is the use of YouTube as a conversion tool.

Most advertisers I talk to ask how much traffic YouTube will generate back towards their own site. Unfortunately, the only way to do this today is to include a back-link in the video description. Google requires brand channel owners to invest in media spend to drive traffic towards the brand channel and its content – on YouTube. Advertisers can use the available inventory on partner channels and other sites within the Google content network to purchase display, in-video and – in some markets – pre-roll. But once you have the attention of your audience on your own brand channel videos, you cannot instantly drive traffic back to the brand site from the video itself. Exclusive use of in-video advertising on your own content would be a desired feature. Advertisers should be enabled to use part of their required media investment to purchase such positions at Google’s ratecard prices (instead of AdWords, since there is no one to bid against).

Other than perhaps some technical and administrative hurdles, I cannot imagine why Google would not offer such features to brand channel owners. It clearly adds value to the brand channel proposition, while it also helps Google to more effectively monetize YouTube.

Agree or disagree? Please comment.

“TubeMogul is interested in expanding to other markets, which includes Europe”, says David Burch of TubeMogul, “Richard was quick to understand the benefits that TubeMogul delivers in terms of content syndication and video tracking. We look forward to working with Richard, through his newly formed consultancy Branded Channels.”

TubeMogul allows for efficient video content syndication on multiple video networks with a single upload. Supported sites include YouTube, MySpace Video, Metacafe, Revver, Blip.tv, Vimeo and many others. Using TubeMogul for video syndication provides the efficiency many brands need when distributing to branded channels on multiple video platforms.

Another great feature of TubeMogul is the extensive video tracking services offered. With TubeMogul, Branded Channels is capable of tracking any YouTube channel. Reports on individual or multiple video channels are now available.

For for information, please contact Richard van den Boogaard at richard[at]brandedchannels.com or +31 6 52 368 276.