YouTube videos to now link to external sites
Big news from YouTube that has major implications for media publishers. Tomorrow, the video sharing company will allow advertisers to place semi-transparent pop-ups over videos that link directly to a Web page.
It’s the first time that YouTube is allowing links on videos that leave the YouTube environment; before this, you could link to another YouTube video but that was it. If you wanted to externally link, you could do that only from a link on the right side of the screen, not from within the video itself. That also made it beyond the reach of embedded videos.
The potential is enormous. For classified publishers, a video on a particular item – be it a home, vehicle or job posting – can link directly to the listing on your site. Ditto for news publishers. And of course it makes huge sense for other types of advertisers and brands as well.
The product’s official name is the “Call-To-Action Overlay.”
Driving traffic away from a site is not necessarily the best way to generate more revenue. So why is YouTube doing this? One reason: you have to be a paying YouTube advertiser to take advantage of the new service.
How will you use (and yes, you will) this new feature? Post a comment on the blog below.
