The other day I watched a few videos online. First, I started off over at MSNBC watching Chris Matthew's Hardball's College Tour and then for some odd reason, I ended up following a few links to a YouTube video with MSNBC's Keith Obermann. Of course both units had advertising on the margins with YouTube's primary advertising revenue source being Google PPC Content Targeting ads. Besides the obvious copyright battles, what about the ad revenue battle between Google PPC Content Text ads versus MSN's ad targeting system.
MSNBC historically has high CPM rates for display ads especially 
ones framing video ads. Believe me, I ought to know because I've been buying on MSN for years. Their traffic is being diverted to YouTube-Google when people upload this co pyrighted material so instead of watching it on MSNBC you can see it on YouTube. The revenue generated from this should be lower (not a scientific analysis but just based on my experience in running content CPCs versus buying display ads). In effect, MSN is losing traffic and revenue when these files are uploaded. I can't believe they will continue to allow this which not only becomes a battle over copyrighted material but also a battle in ad revenue models. Even if they had a deal, they'd have to make it up on tremendous amounts of clicks.
So, where do you think the battle is going to end up? If you are a major publisher like MSN or Disney and have tremendous amounts of traffic already, I can't believe you are going to sit on the sidelines and let YouTube take your traffic away with your own protected media. How much pay per click advertising from clueless advertisers using Google's content targeting would need to go to MSN or Disney to allow this to occur? I'd think the derived CPMs wouldn't match up for a while. And, if they don't send orders to YouTube to remove it, I hope they don't go after the consumers that posted it as my fellow Marketing Prof Mack Collier warns in his post called The Google-YouTube Deal: Here's What You Missed. It should be an interesting fight....I wonder who gets to copyright it and post it on YouTube.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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