We’ve known about this for a couple of months now, but had signed an NDA, it became public today.
Google Just Monetized the YouTube Universe, and Extended it to the Web via Ad Sense.
Not only is YouTube an enormous, untapped ecosystem for advertising, but AdSense gives Google reach to 76% of the Web, and today Google launched this new program.
Think of it as Google planting a bomb underneath the $75B TV ad market. But there won’t be one loud boom, instead, as time begins to tick down (and it began ticking today), it will suck out TV advertising and flow it to the Web.
It’s sort of ironic that for the past couple of months investors have been giddy about financing Facebook-related apps, and Facebook is not a money machine (at least not yet) though Google clearly is.
This is why I’ve been saying that online video content is the next wave of obsession of VCs who invest in video (first file sharing networks, then ad networks)… now it’s going to be all about content.
Have to step into a meeting, more later.