On Convergenceculture, the question is asked on "whether advertisers are ready to invest more money on a channel without real control over the content being shown, as much of the popular original content tends to be controversial and entrenched in YouTube community drama, such as the Lisa Nova spam fiasco."
The answer is of course, it depends on what your brand represents. For the vast majority of businesses, YouTube (Nasdaq:GOOG) is a long way from offering any value to advertisers. As a matter of fact, for most it would harm, rather than add value to them.
One example is the use of inserted thumbnails within a video which can have anything (like raunch and violence) put in the middle of the clip.
Google is evidently also trying to make video clips more viral, add better metrics and analytics, and offer a system where what "viewers also liked" would be included; something like Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) does.
All of this misses the point: Is my brand safe and controlled against the content? Google won't answer the question because it's "no."
Adding all the other without guarding a brand makes the changes irrelevant. What do I care about metrics and analytics if my brand is being placed against garbage videos? All it does is show how much damage is done, not if it's making a difference.
Why would I want be advertising to go viral with a video if it's going to harm my brand? It doesn't make sense.
A key reason this is happening is because professional video is about to become a big player online, and the marketing dollars are going to gravitate to this known entity. In that case, YouTube loses much of its value from a marketing standpoint, and will become known simply as a costly hangout for amateurs to watch each others videos.
It may generate a lot of web traffic, but it doesn't do much else. Until Google and YouTube face the real problem, they're doing nothing but changing secondary issues without dealing with what really needs to be changed.
This is why Google is trying so hard to land major media video on YouTube, without a lot of success. The major media companies aren't going to go their too much until they see how Hulu and other sites fare. If they do well, it's going to be difficult for YouTube to remain the same.
It'll probably take about a year to see how it all works out.
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