Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 2:30 PM PT

 

Next Big Thing for YouTube: E-Commerce Links

YouTube today announced it has added the option to incorporate e-commerce links from videos on its site to relevant iTunes and Amazon products. The move was expected, as YouTube CEO Chad Hurley described doing exactly that at a talk in June and such links have been out in the wild for a while now.

Honestly this seems like a tiny feature addition, especially since more and more YouTube producers are using its annotations tools to add links to other videos and pages on YouTube directly within a video at the time and place they feel is most relevant. But YouTube is under widespread scrutiny for any shred of evidence that there is indeed money to be made in online video.

At launch, the new click-to-buy retail links are being used by EMI and Universal Music Group for their music videos (see example) and Electronic Arts for its Spore videos (see example). For now the links are extremely unobtrusive (they’re the very bottom thing in the screenshot above), appearing way down below a video’s rating and viewcount and options to share it on MySpace, Facebook, or Digg. That placement is subject to change after testing, according to Bakari Brock, YouTube’s business affairs counsel, who also mentioned further integration such as the ability to click to buy sunglasses that someone was wearing in a video. Off of YouTube, that expanded clickable in-video functionality is already available from lots of people, including TicTacTi, OverlayTV, Asterpix and Delivery Agent.

The click-to-buy product will only be available to select YouTube partners, who must already have their own accounts on iTunes and/or Amazon. It will also be available for those partners to use on videos uploaded by regular users and then claimed for advertising (rather than taken down) as part of YouTube’s Video ID copyright service. However, it won’t be available to regular users to incorporate their affiliate relationships with Amazon, or recommend other products they like. And it will only be available in the U.S.

Alongside the announcement, YouTube shared some details on its other ad formats, which include homepage video ads, InVideo overlay ads, and contests. The company said that overlay ads — which appear at the beginning of a video for 10-15 seconds over the bottom 20 percent of the player window — have click-through rates of eight to 10 times their display ads. Less than 10 percent of users close the overlay ads (though they do go away if you don’t interact with them).

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Topic: Hitlines, Money & Power

Comments (9)

  • Just to clarify, annotations can only contain YouTube links, you cannot link offsite using annotations.

    fallofautumndistro — 3:39 PM on October 7, 2008 Reply

  • Oh thanks for pointing that out! I made it clear in the post.

    Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee — 4:25 PM on October 7, 2008 Reply

  • When do we see YouTube pre-rolls?

    Frank Sinton — 5:03 PM on October 7, 2008 Reply

  • Google should please let anyone become so called Youtube “partner”. Most countries aren’t part of that thing yet. Let anyone be it, just as anyone from the whole world can put adsense on their website.

    Google should let people have a “Donate” button on their Youtube pages just as Obama and McCain have.

    Google should let all Youtube content provider decide to activate different levels of monetization, including relevant overlay advertising using voice-recognition, using user-submitted video tagging, but also let all the Youtube content providers pick products to sell from each video page as a one click process. Making a video about that new TV? Let people buy it using a one-click process. Display Froogle type price comparisons on product searches as well so people can pick the cheapest price.

    Let all content providers identify their content, so their content would be automatically “claimed” using video and audio recognition using digital and analog fingerprints.

    It’s Google’s responsibility to monetize all this right now, to make this happen as soon as possible.

    Charbax — 8:25 PM on October 7, 2008 Reply

  • Well, it is about time that YouTube ‘begin’ to think about how to get video into the lean in Web 2.0. There are about dozen more things they should be doing like a few of the early innovators, like ourselves, in the area of interactive / clickable video. There are about 6 of us who are way ahead in terms of clickable video. We’re pretty good at this, including very advanced analytics. Have a quick look at http://www.veeple.com and look at our showroom.

    scott broomfield — 8:37 PM on October 7, 2008 Reply

  • A blunt copy or just a creative inspiration? Actually the biggest Japanese video site Nico Nico Douga (and also the biggest competitor of YouTube in Nippon) already uses a very similar business model also in cooperation with Amazon.

    http://www.nicovideo.jp/

    Most interesting point is they started this business model on the mobile phone and then expanded it to their PC site.

    Marco — 3:02 AM on October 8, 2008 Reply

  • Evenhere is another click-to-buy technology, that has an unobtrusive approach. http://www.evenhere.com

    I like:
    Being able to activate or deactivate the plugin as a viewer.
    A small popup bar with thumbnails rather than hotspotting taking away from content.

    smellsworth — 7:51 AM on October 8, 2008 Reply

  • Any guesses on what CPC is being charged for these links? Haven’t other music video sites enabled similar features ?

    Akash — 2:30 PM on October 8, 2008 Reply

  • Videos will be one of the most interesting tools in 2009. Especially the combination with shopping-features could be one the most important factors in ebusiness in the near future.

    Magento — 8:51 AM on January 25, 2009 Reply

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