Pay-per-click ads are here to stay. They work and they’re proven. What’s the next evolutionary step to this advertising platoform? Video pay-per-click, that’s what.
On YouTube.com, here’s how it works now:
- People upload videos.
- They enter a title, description and keywords for that video.
- Once the video is indexed by YouTube, Google Ads display inside the video screen based on the keywords.
Here’s how I believe it will work in the future:
- People upload videos.
- They enter a title and description.
- YouTube indexes all the spoken words in the video using speech recognition software.
- The video’s keyword index then becomes a mixture of what was typed in the Title and Description, and the actual words spoken in the video.
- Google Ads display as before, but additional ads also display the moment a particular keyphrase is uttered. E.g. halfway through a video someone talks about their Ford Taurus and bam!, a sponsored ad for Ford appears.
A couple of quick flies in the ointment:
- Music. YouTube might mistakenly index the lyrics to a song that is played during a video. This would skew the keywords. They could overcome this by not indexing words spoken with a melody, but boy, that would get pretty complicated from a technical standpoint.
- Typed keywords vs spoken keywords. Sometimes they won’t match. And sometimes what is spoken is not necessarily relevant to the video. E.g. Video entitled “Baseball to the groin”, but the only spoken words are “Come on Jimmy! Give me the heat!”
I’m sure there are many other drawbacks to this idea, but it’s just my $0.02 worth of prediction. Nostradmus I am not. But perhaps when you re-read this posting in 5 years it will seem prophetic. Or pathetic; difficult to say.
