No longer just a video sharing site, YouTube will now encourage purchases of products featured in videos. The company has worked out revenue sharing deals with Amazon and iTunes.
by James Brightman on Wednesday, October 08, 2008
YouTube is already the world's most popular video sharing site, but now the Google-owned company is looking to expand its business. According to a Reuters report, YouTube is about to start selling music and games through a partnership with Amazon. The company also intends to experiment with new advertising formats to boost revenues.
Ultimately, YouTube would like to build an entire e-commerce service that will enable users to purchase music, films, TV shows, video games, books, concert tickets and other media-related products featured on the millions of videos on its site. So for example, if someone is watching a video related to EA's Spore, an Amazon link on the page would enable that person to go directly to Amazon to purchase the game. In the case of music videos, YouTube has partnered with Amazon and iTunes. Both Amazon and iTunes will share revenue with YouTube when users buy content through the partnership.
Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube back in 2006, and the search engine behemoth is looking for YouTube to start generating some meaningful revenue. With a new e-commerce plan in place, Piper Jaffray Research has estimated that YouTube could generate about $200 million in revenue in 2009; for comparison purposes, Google itself is estimated to produce $27 billion.
via GameDaily
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