Schmidt stands by YouTube’s revenue earning potential

Cannes: YouTube will meet its ad revenue earning potential, Google chairman and chief executive, Eric Schmidt has claimed today (June 26).

Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt

Talking at a seminar at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, Schmidt said: “We’re much happier now than we were a year ago. The new ad formats are beginning to bring in significant revenues for the company.”

He told Marketing Week that while the video site has taken years to get right, he remained confident that advertisers would want to be associated with the leading user-generated content video website.

“YouTube has taken some work, but the new set of ad products including pre-roll, in-stream, and pay to promote, as well as the text ads are beginning to gain momentum. Some of them seem to be working, others not so much.

“We will keep doing more to encourage choice. There is a connection between culture and consumer here, which is suited for tapping into,” he said.

In May, YouTube launched a trial of pre-roll ads around content from BBC Worldwide, Channel 4, Discovery, ITN and National Geographic.

Schmidt also told Marketing Week that the beta run of Interest Based Advertising – a form of targeted advertising based on user’s interests – was “progressing well with big name collaborators trialling it at the moment”.

He said he was confident it would be rolled out in full in the near future, but declined to give a date.