A month ago I heard the CEO of YouTube say he wasn’t going to put pre-roll ads on user-posted videos. And he didn’t. Instead, he’s letting advertisers create their own YouTube spaces just like any user. Plus he’s letting these advertisers sell ads on their own sites. Yes, ads with ads.
How will this work? Well, Paris Hilton now has a YouTube site with videos to promote her album. And on the site, Warner Bros. Records, the ones producing Paris, sold ad placement for “Prison Break,†a show on Fox which is owned by News Corp., a direct competitor to Time Warner who owns Warner Bros. Records.
In other topsy turvy advertising news: Anheuser Busch, the beer company responsible for creating entertaining and award winning ads is opening up an in-house film and TV production company to make humorous shorts and sitcom-type programs for distribution over the Internet and cell phones.
And Microsoft has invited developers of its number one competitor in the browser space, Firefox, to Redmond, Washington to test its browser in their Windows Vista lab. It’s the first major acceptance by the proprietary software king that open source software is playing a critical role.
