YouTube's mobile website are now serving ads. Yesterday, the ads were lauched on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites. According to Google, Youtube's mobile website traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and today millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The new mobile banner ads will be sold on a daily basis, same way as they are sold on YouTube homepage.

On August 7, 2009  YouTube launched the new mobile website optimized for smartphones including the iPhone, the Palm Pre and the Android G1. The new website was especially designed for smartphones. Earlier you could just log into your account, view your favorites, and discover and share new videos quickly and easily with whoever you choose but now you will also be able to advertise.

Increased usage of high end devices such as smartphones has really changed mobile advertising, making it more effective and easier for the advertisers to promote their businesses and products.


The Mobile ads were first tested with ads from the known brands ranging from L'Oreal to Land Rover. The tests had shown strong results in-terms of clickthroughs, brand-image and brand awareness but unfortunately no numbers were declared on YouTube blog. However, it is quiet natural that YouTube (Google) are quickly gearing towards mobile ads, since smartphone users is exactly the tech-savy demographic that most advertisers sought after. This move also makes YouTube a strongest and probably the only network-serving ads to such large crowd across all mobile ad platforms.

With this move YouTube's advertising revenue will definitely see a spike as they will be encouraging current YouTube hompage advertisers to go for YouTube mobile as well. For example - Mazda is one of first few brands that has taken advantage of the mobile advertising on YouTube by extending their campaign running on Youtube.com homepage to Youtube mobile.

All in all this is not something that many would say was innovative or inventive in this age or time. You also cannot say that this was not pre-planned. I see this as a sweet and rewarding collaboration of technology and business.


RECOMMENDED PRODUCTS