YouTube ad earns water charity $10000 in a day
Posted on | March 29, 2009
Excerpt: “Earlier this week YouTube launched a new feature for non-profit organizations called “Call to Action”, allowing these organizations to place special overlay ads on their videos free of charge…”
Article source:http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/27/
special-youtube-ads-earn-nonprofit-10000-in-a-single-day/
The result is that a video promoted on the the Homepage of YouTube created enough click throughs to generate $10,000 for the charity.
Now, on the face of it that’s a great story. A charity that does serious good is gaining a benefit and everyone will applaud that. But then again, many people are looking behind the catchy headline and doing a few sums.
The video received 300,000 views (it was on the homepage after all), most charity videos will only get a fraction of that - there are only so many spaces on that homepage and only so many days in the year. But as every little helps, you can see the video itself below.
For the wider business community, the story is also ringing alarm bells. Generating an average of 3 cents per view is not going to be appealing for businesses that are bidding around 2 cents for their ad to show. The added problem here is that the ad is a call to action for the video itself. That is the ad was advertising the charity that made the video. If the subject matter of the video was related but not directly linked to the video content, would the click through have even been as high as it was? Is YouTube now suggesting that content owners should be putting ads over their own videos?
Maybe more questions than answers at the moment. But here’s the video…
Tags: Charity > Nonprofit > YouTube