Click-to-Buy added to YouTube

Google just used it's official blog  to serve notice about one its latest attempts turn YouTube into a profitable service.

YouTube videos can now link to sites that sell music or software.

According to the Google blog, "When you view a YouTube video with a great sound track, you often see comments from YouTube users asking about the name of the song and where (you) can download it. Or when users watch the trailer for an upcoming video game, they want to know when it will be released and where they can buy it."

"Today, (Google) is taking steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding "click-to-buy" links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos."

How much revenue can Google can get out of hosting these links?

Click-to-buy links are different than the ads that Google already allows companies to embed around their videos. With click-to-buy, Google is collecting revenue for products sold or products downloaded, NOT just for click throughs.   Here is an example of a click-to-buy in place. 

Best as I can tell, Google is negotiating directly with publishers about how much it is going to charge for embedding and managing these new types of links.  Early participants in the plan include music publishers EMI and Universal Music Group as well as EA, the publisher of the Spore game.  It's a new plan, and my guess is that rates are variable and are going to change depending upon the size of the publisher and on how well received click-to-buy proves to be.   In time everyone will probably be able to add click-to-adds to their YouTube videos, but for the time being this is only for large publishers.  But there are real implications for all of us - read on.

Is YouTube going to become just another e-commerce platform? 

I don't think YouTube will ever become just another e-commerce platform. As far as I can tell, the plan is to keep supporting all the great free features that noncommercial and less-well heeled commercial users have come to love in YouTube. On the other, I don't blame Google for trying to come up with way to actually make money out of YouTube.  I don't care how deep Google's pocket are -- seems to me if YouTube doesn't start paying for itself soon services are going to have to be cut or altered. 

Google admits it wants YouTube to become an e-commerce platform.

Here is what Google says about e-commerce in their blog: Click-to-buy "is just the beginning of (Google's quest to build) a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. (Google's) vision is to help partners across all industries -- from music, to film, to print, to TV -- offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos."

Will this squash or enable the use of borrowed content? 

We all know that stealing using copyrighted music in your user-generated video is a no-no.  Most of us also know that enforcement of this rule is pretty spotty.

Some publishers have decided accept the inevitable and allow some use of their catalog within user-generated content. 
Others are using Google's content identification system to find and remove unauthorized of snippets of music from YouTube. 

Policing the web for unauthorized use of copy righted material is expensive and is bound to piss off some of your more rabid fans. What's  a publisher to do?  In its blog Google suggests there is a third alternative. Leave the offending videos up, but insert click-to-buy links right below.  Here is what Google has to say about that: "Those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site."

How dare Google commercialize my artistic statement?
 
Of course the day when Google starts placing un-asked for commercial links alongside user-generated content some users are going to raise a major stink. I can hear the screaming already "How dare Google commercialize my artistic statement!"   To be fair, Google is only threatening to do this in cases where you have cast the first stone.  Don't want this to happen? Don't incorporate someone else's work in your own.  My take is if  a musician allows you to incorporate thier music in your work, you should not begrudge that musician from trying to make some money from that music. 

In a previous post, I published some rules you can follow to keep your mashup legal.  Will following these rules keep Google from commercializing your video with click-to-buy?  Only time will tell. But my guess is that once commercializing begins they are going to commercialize everything they can.