After having successfully launched YouTube on mobile phones last January, parent company, Google, has started testing display ads on certain selected pages on YouTube mobile, in the U.S.A. and Japan.
Google hopes to gain better insights into how users interact with mobile video advertising. Advertisers will be able to use this as a new medium to promote their brand and expand their audience to target the millions of users that access YouTube on their mobiles regularly.
This move will be beneficial for both content producers as well as users, since content producers will be able to use this facility as a means of generating revenue, which will in turn allow publishers to make more content available for free, thereby bringing down costs for users who wish to access videos on their mobiles.
Product Marketing Manager for YouTube, Christine Tsai, says, “This is our first step, in testing mobile advertising for YouTube – it will give you a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn.”
Video ads on YouTube are currently available in two formats – InVideo ads and placement targeted ads. Additionally, advertisers can create branded channels on YouTube and promote videos via click-to-play ads. It is not clear at present which formats will be made available when the mobile video advertising service goes live for all YouTube advertisers.
