Gawker
Google plans to turn over about of third of YouTube's homepage to advertisers willing to pay $200,000 per day, reports Silicon Alley Insider. The ad will be the height of a standard YouTube video but will stretch across the width of the screen. For a standard-sized YouTube video ad on the homepage, Google charges advertisers $175,000 per day and requires that they spend a daily $50,000 on advertising elsewhere on the site. Earlier this summer, Time Warner's online property AOL tried to fix underperforming ad revenues with a similar tactic, offering advertisers what AOL called the biggest banner in the business. MySpace charges $1 million for similar homepage takeovers. The only hitch: These tactics can leave interactive agencies on Madison Avenue unwilling to spend their client's money.
In the view of one Madison avenue agency exec, Google bought YouTube back in 2006 "because they didn't want someone else to, and now they don't know what to do with it." Clients don't always want to take over an entire site and would prefer to purchase a smaller run of good inventory. Site takeovers can work as an expensive one-off — think movie premieres — but don't help promote a brand over the long term. But Google doesn't have a YouTube product to serve that need. As a result, the exec told Valleywag, the YouTube sales people try to sell the same things over and over again, just with new names. Well, at least now they're trying new sizes, too.
