How would you monetize YouTube?

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Stanley

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Suppose you owned Youtube, or that you were responsible for YouTube's revenue....How would you monetize it?
I know some people here are far more creative than others, so this should make for an interesting discussion.


[edit]: This isn't a "what would you do if you sold YouTube" thread, nobody cares about your problems ;)
 
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Hmm, random small commercials at the beginning and the end of videos, no ads for paid memberships (give them a different text color when posting comments and avatars to feel special), paid featured videos, 18+ paid membership section (totally separated from the mainstream part, no user upload, companies have to pay to get their adult videos listed) and some good contextual advertising all over.
 
Suppose you owned Youtube,

If I owned Youtube I would sell it to Google and from then on my problems would be...
where to find underwater speakers so I can listen to music while swimming...
which beach to go tomorrow afternoon, where to get a Rock band and strippers for the cat's birthdays party, fireworks, roasted pigs, cows, rivers of wine etc etc...
 
Some might try to monetize it, but not me.

Honestly, if I owned YouTube right now at this very second in time, I would try to sell it for one lump sum and never have to worry about making money ever again. I'd be set for life. With THAT much money, the interest you'd be making off your bank accounts would be insane. No need to play the stock market or invest in anything. Just total peace of mind.

Then...

1. I'd pay off my debts
2. Give my mom, brother, sisters, and my best friend Sean a shiton of money so that they would be set for life.
3. Buy a big house up in the Rocky Mountains (I miss Colorado)
4. Buy a few nice cars.
5. Find a nice girl to marry, start a family and RELAX for the rest of my days .

Nothing too fancy. I'm a simple man. :)
 
Yup, me would sell it off too..

And then:

1. Reinvest the money to put it on a few more ideas
2. Put the money into real estate and stocks
3. Buy mutual funds
4. Put the rest of the money in the bank and live off the interest.
 
Chatmasta and Starkreality, I like your ideas of an 18+ site. Since they already have the infrastructure in place, they could easily feed a decent paid adult PPV membership site with higher quality videos. Not to mention they could offer up a decent affiliate package for us to help market it and get some of the pie as well. Anyone else's thoughts?
 
I would introduce memberships with exclusive high-quality content. All the videos would be permanently watermarked.

Memberships would be relatively cheap but the pricing would be incrementally increased as time goes by.

I would also introduce pre-roll and post-roll advertising for videos that are 5 minutes or longer.

The adult network is a neat idea. There's tons of potential in it.
 
  1. Start monetizing the reg path. Put up a page of co-reg offers. They could make probably $1/user that registers. Then you make people register to view video's.
  2. Setup levels of accounts. Level 1 is a freebie acct, here you have limited access to video's. Then do a level 2 where you pay say $9.99/mo and you gain access to all the video's.
  3. Before they show you a video, display an ad.

Youtube is one of the biggest goldmines out there, but they're making very little mone compared to what they could.
 
The trick is to not monetize it right now. Bandwidth is only getting cheaper so each day youtube's cost per user is going down. Right now their job is to maintain position as market leader in online video and not alienate their userbase. Youtube has never been profitable and if they tried to be at any point in their life cycle they never would've gotten as big as they are. That's why they're youtube and everyone else isn't.

Google has the cash and bandwidth to hold them up without more venture capital so the sale makes sense for both parties. I'm sure right now they are only concerned with making the site as good as possible, not turning a profit.
 
I don't like the idea of pre-roll. I think thats what seperate youtube from competition. If youtube had preroll I wouldnt browse around nearly as much. I would just get annoyed and leave.

What about monetizing the fame of select, "YouTube Celebrities" such as TheWineKone, LisaNova and DaxFlame? By the way I love the winekone and especially obsessed with the DaxFlame videos.

But... make these top channels more of a focus of the site and allow companies to "sponsor" these individual channels, which should allow them to hone into a certain demographic while reaching loyal "channel watchers" repeatedly. In addition, make payouts to the "celebrities" who bring in the most ad revenue.

I wouldn't want them to junk up YouTube too much with revenue schemes and I think pre-roll, post roll puts a big dent in the user experience.

Tough question you propose here...
 
I would just keep it the way it was to encourage growth. How much do you think they are making/month just off the adsense? Whatever it is, I'm sure its a number that I would be happy making per month.
 
  1. Start monetizing the reg path. Put up a page of co-reg offers. They could make probably $1/user that registers. Then you make people register to view video's.
  2. Setup levels of accounts. Level 1 is a freebie acct, here you have limited access to video's. Then do a level 2 where you pay say $9.99/mo and you gain access to all the video's.
  3. Before they show you a video, display an ad.
Youtube is one of the biggest goldmines out there, but they're making very little mone compared to what they could.

no offense, but all the things you propose would kill YouTube about 1 minute after they incorporated them.

Seriously, if YOU had to start paying for YouTube tomorrow, what would YOU do?

MY guess is that you wouldn't hand over your credit card and say," please auto-bill me every month YouTube!!!". Nope, my guess is you'd find a different site that was free.

You have to understand that YouTube doesn't have to be profitable right this second. Google didn't pay $1.6 bil for it to start turning a profit right away.

Right now, it's all about making YouTube the #1 website for videos. It's also about creating a community where people will go and hang out.

I'm sure that evenutally you'll be able to buy advertising on YouTube just like Adwords. That's a potential profit channel right there.

The important thing with YouTube is how it works out for Google long-term. It's all about convergence in Google's mind. As more people get high speed internet and video technology expands even further, the line between the internet and television will become blurred.

That's where the BIG money will come in.

Google's vision for YouTube is probably much bigger than making it a great "website". It's likely Google feels youTube could become a media center, an interactive form of television.

It would become something like a combination of YouTube, MySpace, and, say, MTV.
 
I'd sell it back to the creators for 500 million and live the high life, well at least for the first week before I died from excitement.
 
I would probably put 2 banner ads on it. Someone mentioned above that they would put a small commercial at the start and end of each video which would make money, but will also be worse than actual banner ads on the site I think. People load the videos and want to watch them, it's had enough having to sit through and watch the commercials on the TV, which is always a good time to make a cup of tea or go to the toilet. lol
 
no offense, but all the things you propose would kill YouTube about 1 minute after they incorporated them.

Seriously, if YOU had to start paying for YouTube tomorrow, what would YOU do?

MY guess is that you wouldn't hand over your credit card and say," please auto-bill me every month YouTube!!!". Nope, my guess is you'd find a different site that was free.

You have to understand that YouTube doesn't have to be profitable right this second. Google didn't pay $1.6 bil for it to start turning a profit right away.

Right now, it's all about making YouTube the #1 website for videos. It's also about creating a community where people will go and hang out.

I'm sure that evenutally you'll be able to buy advertising on YouTube just like Adwords. That's a potential profit channel right there.

The important thing with YouTube is how it works out for Google long-term. It's all about convergence in Google's mind. As more people get high speed internet and video technology expands even further, the line between the internet and television will become blurred.

That's where the BIG money will come in.

Google's vision for YouTube is probably much bigger than making it a great "website". It's likely Google feels youTube could become a media center, an interactive form of television.

It would become something like a combination of YouTube, MySpace, and, say, MTV.

Let's face it, there's no real way to effectively monetize YouTube's traffic. These idea's I posted probably would kill a lot of the traffic, but it would help make more money than it is now.
 
Let's face it, there's no real way to effectively monetize YouTube's traffic. These idea's I posted probably would kill a lot of the traffic, but it would help make more money than it is now.

No one could think of a way to monetize google's traffic, but they did it. Damn well, too.

You can bet your money's worth that google has better plans than a couple of banner ads to monetize YouTube...they didn't pay all that money for nothing.
 
No one could think of a way to monetize google's traffic, but they did it. Damn well, too.

You can bet your money's worth that google has better plans than a couple of banner ads to monetize YouTube...they didn't pay all that money for nothing.

Who thought Google couldn't monetize their traffic? And besides, Google is primarily search based revenue in which people pay for clicks.
 
They could try to make people pay for copyrighted material and porn. So youtube could pay fees to copyrightowners. They should use virtual money, so you could preload your account and than watch premium movies. Rest will stay free. With virtual money, people loose the overview of what they invested. Also youtube could set up VOD for dvd movies. Some companies already offer VOD, why not youtube?
 
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