Could search advertising be big on YouTube?
Google’s announcement last week that YouTube would begin selling advertising, or “sponsored results,” alongside video searches has more punch than initially thought.
YouTube is the third largest search site after Google’s main Web search engine and the Yahoo’s search properties, giving it a broad reach for advertisers who can learn their way around.
According to Compete, YouTube fielded nearly 770 million search queries in October, compared with Google’s 7.1 billion and Yahoo’s 1.9 billion. MSN and Live Search from Microsoft came in fourth with 643 million.
This monthly total was up 35 percent from last year and dwarfed the less than 2 million at each of the video search sites Blinkx.com and Truveo.com, said Compete.
This kind of volume creates opportunities for advertisers eager to replace the banner and in-video ad formats they have used up to now with ads responding to the search intent of YouTube visitors, Compete said in a blog. Advertisers also can begin paying on a cost-per-click basis, just as they do with Google Adwords, instead of by CPM, or cost per thousands of ads views.
