14 DAY TRIAL // Apart from the billion views it is now celebrating, YouTube is marking another, equally important milestone. The site has now served 500 million promoted videos, advertising for which it gets paid. The message that Google is trying to send is clear, YouTube is bringing in revenue.
"This month we served the 500,000,000th Promoted Video view. Promoted Videos average approximately three minutes in duration -- it would take a single viewer 2,853 years to watch them all," YouTube revealed.
Promoted videos are featured on the YouTube homepage or in search results for relevant topics. They function somewhat like Google's AdWords program, but for videos.
The interesting thing is though that the videos, while they may be ads, are content by themselves, the idea is to get users to want to watch promoted videos just like they would any other video on the site.
"In the past year, we’ve seen a more than six-fold increase in the number of times viewers have clicked to watch a Promoted Video," the video site says.
"In fact, many video ads reach over 1 million video views, offering everything from solutions for bad breath to candy bars and cars – some of which have achieved increased viewership using Promoted Videos," it continues.
Overall, YouTube's monetization efforts are on the rise. Google has said that it monetizes about 2 billion views per week, out of more than 2 billion views per day. The company also said that it has doubled its monetization rate from the last year.
YouTube is one of Google's biggest properties, but, like many of its products, it's not making it too much money. Things have been improving and Google is eager to point out from time to time just how well YouTube is doing, though it hasn't released any revenue numbers or said if the site is profitable yet.