Viral Video

After years of regarding pirated video on YouTube as a threat, some major media companies are having a change of heart, treating it instead as an advertising opportunity.

If the $1 billion Web video advertising market is to reach the level of television's estimated $50 billion, it ironically won't be thanks to YouTube, the Internet's most popular spot for watching clips.

Brand display ads will be “the primary driver of monetization for video,” YouTube CEO Chad Hurley said tonight at a tech startup dinner in Palo Alto, but he went on to lay out an argument that there’s also a growing opportunity to make money from direct response affiliate deals.

Speaking at Supernova2008, a business-centric tech conference that kicked off this afternoon within shouting distance of San Francisco Bay, YouTube's Jordan Hoffner pointed out that many of today's advertisers aren't all that interested in the so-called fragmented audience.

VisibleCampaign helps advertisers and their agencies understand the effectiveness of in-market campaigns and make better decisions about future video advertising investments. As part of its ongoing efforts to determine the true value of Internet video as an advertising medium, Visible Measures also announced today that it has agreed to conduct a series of joint projects in collaboration with Dynamic Logic, the leading digital advertising effectiveness research company.

A new handful of YouTube videos supposedly show cell phones popping popcorn. The method: Surround kernels with a few cell phones and call the phones. When they ring, the kernels pop. The videos have gotten a couple million combined views, and they've seemingly convinced many commenters to fear phones, despite the several obvious signs that they're fake.