ESPN will integrate its own video player on YouTube on July 15, as well as the offer pre-roll advertising on the video site. Double whammy really, because it will be the first company to do this both on YouTube. All other channel partners use YouTube’s customary player and Youtube has till now not been keen to use Pre-Roll ads on its videos. It was earlier touted to come to YouTube by April.
There are a few other notable features of this development. This most important among them being the fact that ESPN is owned by Disney and Disney in turn is an investor in YouTube’s competitor Hulu.com. The Hulu move was from the perspective of providing TV series and movies on Hulu’s site. This can be gathered from the announcement that followed the investment - The agreement will enhance Hulu’s programming line-up through the expanded online distribution of Disney’s most popular current and library primetime series and library feature films. In particular, full-length episodes of hit current and library programs likeLost, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, etc.
Technically, ESPN’s programs could easily have been part of Hulu.com. Why did it have to come to YouTube? It certainly can’t be YouTube’s traffic, and I say this because ESPN already has an official channel on YouTube and the views its videos get are hardly flaterring, in fact abysmal with views below 1000 on many. The couple of possible reasons can be, that perhaps the audience at Hulu wouldn’t have been the best to promote sports programming. The other could have been a very exciting revenue offer from YouTube, after all they have even agreed to pre-rolling ads with this deal.
This move clearly goes against what Google had claimed when YouTube officially brought ads on its platform after months of testing. In an announcement they had said, “Pre-rolls and post-rolls did not perform well on our platform. [In our testing,] 75 percent of our users were unhappy with them.” I guess two years (almost) since the launch of advertising, they might have also realized that the users aren’t quite click savvy either and decided to move on and make some money while they are at it.
It will be interesting to note how ESPN would use this platform this time around, whether it will perform better and get some more views than getting stuck at 500. Also the money they make and how pre-rolls perform on YouTube in all probability might set the future trend in advertising on the popular media site.
