A patent application reveals one of YouTube's potential tools for driving up revenue

Jan 15, 2010 17:51 GMT  ·  By
A patent application reveals one of YouTube's potential tools for driving up revenue
   A patent application reveals one of YouTube's potential tools for driving up revenue

YouTube may be on its way to becoming profitable, but it's not quite there yet. One sure way to achieve that is by driving up revenue, which, this being Google, means advertising. A patent filling has popped up which may indicate one way Google plans to bring in more advertisers to the video site, by making it easier for small advertisers to create video ads.

The patent, dubbed “Video Overlay Advertisement Creator,” spotted by GoRumors, describes a tool which enables advertisers to create overlay ads through a simple web interface. Specifically, the patent application reads:

"A method for creating a video overlay advertisement for display with a digital video, the method comprising: providing a browser-based user interface to a client, the user interface including an advertisement viewing area and adapted to receive inputs specifying attribute values of a desired video overlay advertisement; receiving the specified attribute values from the client; creating a video overlay advertisement having the specified attribute values; storing the video overlay advertisement; and providing the video overlay advertisement to the client."

The reason why Google would want to create this is obvious, a simple tool like this would lower the barrier of entry for advertisers enabling smaller companies which may not afford to pay an ad agency to create a video ad for them. In theory, this would mean that more people would buy ads on YouTube further helping with the monetization efforts.

Despite growing tremendously in the past year, most videos on YouTube aren't being monetized meaning that there still a lot of potential to grow. One reason for this is that big advertisers and companies are reluctant to place their brands next to user-generated video which may or may not go well with its target audience. This has been addressed by Google by bringing in more quality professional videos to the site. On the other hand, smaller companies may be willing to take more risks opening up a market which hasn't been traditionally too involved in online video.