How many of you guys actually view the promoted videos section on YouTube?? I just sign in and look at one thing, my numbers. Majority of online users that we would be targeting are already familiar with YouTube. I bet 8 out of 10 of them overlook that junk and rarely see the homepage. Its like seeing 468x60 banner ads, we naturally just overlook them and don't even notice they are there. The video can't play automatically, or it will count as a view, so there goes one way of grabbing attention. You are then stuck with a still image in the center of the video so it can be your thumbnail. Most people when they see something like that, they know it isn't usually relevant. I don't know how many times I got fooled by those videos of some hot chick in a bikini, only to find out the video is some 300lb woman dancing to britney spears. I only saw that hot chick for like 5 seconds... What a shame..
Point being, YouTube isn't new, and majority of its users know exactly what they are looking for, and it isn't our ads that we paid for in the promotional videos section. And since its like most ads, you gotta pay per click. YT gets way too many views, and has a horrible conversion ratio. Like you could have a 20% conversion ratio for an offer, do it the YT marketing way and get like a 2% conversion ratio. You will be spending way more than you profit. I see negative ROIs for majority of the offers.
The only hope is that you can target by profile information like age, sex, interests, ect, similar to Facebook Ads, and then and only then are your videos/ads shown in their promotional video spot. If it is shown to every user, we are fucked. We all know how many people click just to click.
The success of going positive ROIs is going to be who creates the most original and "out of the box" ad narrowed down to a small group of people. It will have to be an offer never seen before, or too good to pass up. Like say a new video game is on pre-release and you can get people to order their copy ahead of time. But it would have to be something huge like Halo 4 or an xbox triangle lol. The standard marketing as we are used to doing will more than likely not work here. People go to youtube because they want to be entertained, not lose weight.
I guess we will see when the time comes, I personally don't have hopes for it. It is 10x better to target keywords and rank well. If I am selling a make money online offer or something, I can land on 1st page for "make money online" in about 3-5 days, and its free. I am getting targeted traffic for free. Most people that are going to signup arent going to have "make money online" in their description for us to target them. The only people that will, are the fellow marketers, and they arent signing up.
