As Google has acknowledged before, monetizing YouTube has been a major challenge for the Internet giant, even though it is one of the web’s most visited sites. Now, Google is trying out post-roll ads on the popular online video service. Currently, as NewTeeVee notes, these post-roll ads only appear if you do not click on the overlay ads while a video is playing. Google has tested post-roll ads before, but in these earlier versions, users had to initiate the ads themselves, while these new ads will play automatically.
For now, these new ads only appear on a small number of videos uploaded by YouTube’s official partners. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was experimenting with both post- and pre-roll ads, though thankfully, it looks like the company has decided against using pre-roll ads for now.
It’s important to note that Google has been hesitant to roll out ads for all of its YouTube inventory because of the possible copyright issues involved. However, given that cost of running a bandwidth-hungry service like YouTube and the number of daily visitors, it only makes sense for Google to keep looking for new strategies to make at least some money off the service.
For now, these post-roll ads are not very intrusive, but they do signal a shift towards a more aggressive push to monetize YouTube and we wouldn’t be surprised to see Google experimenting with pre-roll ads in the near future as well.
