YouTube goes for a bigger picture
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Kai Ryssdal: YouTube apparently shares its parent company’s goal of world domination. You might remember the video-sharing website was bought by Google a couple of months ago.
We learned this morning YouTube’s expanding its services into nine other countries. Content will be offered in the local language, tailored to that particular culture.
Janet Babin reports now from the Marketplace Innovations Desk at North Carolina Public Radio, it’ll also give the company nine more places to collect advertising revenue.
Janet Babin: What’s funny in Spain doesn’t necessarily fly in France. That’s one reason YouTube announced it’ll customize its site in nine countries — so users will get the videos that most appeal to them, in their own cultural currency.
But James McQuivey with Forrester Research says the real reason for YouTube’s expansion is the currency of advertising revenue:
James McQuivey: They’ll talk about serving local cultures and local customers, but what they’re really doing is building a large base of advertising inventory. And that’s what this is really about. That’s their business.
And video advertising can be a lot more lucrative than text ads on YouTube’s parent company, Google.
Jason Glickman with Tremor Media expects YouTube will eventually place localized video ads on the international sites in a variety of ways:
Jason Glickman: Before you get to the video, or layovers on top of the video, or video ads at the end of the content you’ve chosen to see.
The expansion is a page right out of Google’s playbook. Localized Google search engine sites exist all over the world, so taking a video-sharing site in the same direction was a given.
But McQuivey says the company’ll have to work harder to leap frog over existing video-sharing sites, like DailyMotion in France.
McQuivey: Daily Motion has announced a very proactive strategy to protect the copyrighted content that shows up on their site, something that YouTube hasn’t done.
YouTube has licensing agreements with hundreds of European content providers, and is working on more deals. In the U.S., Viacom is suing YouTube and Google for copyright infringement. YouTube has denied any wrongdoing.
I’m Janet Babin for Marketplace.
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