YouTube announced this morning that its three-year-old Promoted Videos advertising program has now shown one billion videos. That sounds pretty great for a website that was widely believed to be a giant black hole for bandwidth and money.
When viewed in context, though, it sounds a little less amazing. This spring the site announced that it is now showing viewers more than three billion videos every single day. So one billion views of promoted videos seems like a pebble tossed in a very big body of water.
Two years ago the program expanded beyond YouTube and began offering up Promoted Videos as a part of Google’s AdSense too, so these promoted videos have an opportunity to be seen almost anywhere. Apparently people don’t like to watch video ads that much, if as many regular videos are viewed each day before dinnertime as have been shown under the promotional program over three entire years.
Above, YouTube co-founder announces Promoted Videos as a “democratic” way to get more views for your content. In theory, priming the pump a little bit makes sense. It’s unclear how well the program has worked, though.
Asked at a conference last Spring how well YouTube promoted videos were working out for advertisers, Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager, YouTube & Google Content Network, said that that it was still a relatively young program.
