I think I have mentioned Google’s incredible …um…testiness before. They love to try out new ideas before sending them into perpetual beta (hello Gmail) or actually launching them as real offerings. This has been less evident over at Google-owned YouTube — though with all of the fretting over making their investment back it’s only a matter of time before they begin to randomly beam “Chocolate Rain” into people’s cerebellums. Just to test the technology out.
This morning came word via eagle-eyed Anthony Iaffaldano, Reprise Media Marketing Director, that YouTube had actually sprung a little test action on his watch. While embedding a video on a totally non-geeky message board he was surprised to find that his embedded clip came with a search toolbar:
When he used the bar to search it retrieved other videos from Google. John McCain seems to think it’s pretty cool:
More than that though, it’s another piece in the monetization puzzle. YouTube is already displaying search ads similar to what Google does on their search results. Exporting that ability whoever a video is embedded on another site increases the reach of these ads exponentially. Though there aren’t ads in the test we are showing here, it could be done and there’s already evidence that Google is thinking along these lines.
Google announced today that YouTube would be running overlay ads not just on YouTube videos but on other sites where those YouTube videos are embedded – earning revenue whether on or off the main site. The leap from that to an embedded search bar with embedded search ad results is not a big one to make.
With estimates coming in of Google’s earnings under pressure in the challenging ad environment its clear that their plans for YouTube have taken on a new urgency. So it seems, has their plans for testing new ways of producing revenue.
