YouTube to Introduce Call-to-Action Overlay Ads

YouTube will be introducing a new ad type to its range of advertising options, according to TechCrunch, which could prove a very powerful addition for brands, charities or just about anyone trying to promote their web page on the video sharing site. The new ad is called Call-to-Action Overlay and is basically a transparent box popping up at the bottom of the video and enabling advertisers to link to their sites.

Up until now there was no way to include a clickable link in a YouTube video and the only way to share a link was to add it to the description on the right hand side. Links could be included in the annotations to the videos but they could be only for other YouTube videos and could only be added by other users not the owner of the video.

The Call-to-Action Overlay ads were actually introduced a while ago but were only available for testing to a handful of charities or other parties. They proved quite popular in some cases, raising large amounts of money in a short time period. For example the charity:water foundation used this type of ad in one of its videos, which was featured on the YouTube homepage and proved to be a success.

“The response from the YouTube community was overwhelming – thanks to you, charity:water was able to raise over $10,000 in one day from the video. That's enough to build two brand-new wells in the Central African Republic and give over 150 people clean drinking water for 20 years,” a post on the YouTube blog reads.

YouTube hasn't been very keen on introducing these types of ads before as the links would drive traffic away from the video sharing site to other third-party sites. The program will only be available to paying advertisers on YouTube and only for the videos included in the “Promoted Videos” program.