Following a recent article in MarketingVox with the attention grabbing headline ‘Advertisers Line Up at YouTube Killer’s Door’ I was very keen to jump on this absurd idea and set forth a few facts and figures about exactly why there will be no slang of YouTube as the article so happily shouted about. This is something which seems to often happen when a company, brand or website starts to make serious moves, the big boys struggle to deal with it and therefore look to find ways of tearing it down. Let’s have a look at what the article talked about and then why I believe it to be painfully wrong. 

NBC 

The genesis of the article is the announcement of a new video site by NBS which will be of a similar model to YouTube. The article goes on to say how all of the big advertisers are waiting in the wings for the launch of this NBC site, foaming at the mouth to invest their shareholder’s millions into smarter and more efficient advertising. 

YouTube Complaints 

The notion behind this nonsense is that advertisers are becoming increasingly wary of the content which is on YouTube and which will follow their ads. These advertisers genuinely believe that aligning their name with some potentially risky content is not a great way of doing things. What they fail to recognize here is that not only do YouTube have a strict content policy around violence, racism etc. but also that most YouTube viewers will never think that a wildlife video of two animals fighting is a clear indication that General Motors don’t care about animal rights, or any other such leap of faith which they expect people to find as a link between ad and video. 

Mis-Direction

As is very often the case with the industry giants who have more money than sense, is that they are aiming their ire and their creativity in the wrong direction. Wholly ignoring a site which is offering up 100 million clips per day, and which by the way will be up to the billions in just a couple of years, is absurd. Instead of backing new video streaming services from their chums at NBC, big companies should be focused instead of harnessing the power of YouTube and setting up creative videos which will act as adverts, which can then even be bookended with commercial ads. 

There is absolutely nothing suggesting that YouTube is a bad place to advertise, on the contrary in fact, which is why it is a foolish notion to take your hard earned marketing dollars away from a site which has shown such rapid growth, and put them into a new and utterly untested video streaming platform. Those dollars will be worth significantly less than if they were pumped into YouTube instead. Let’s see what the future holds and just how quickly that money is ripped out of the hands of NBC and handed back to YouTube.