Product & Startup Builder

Do We Owe YouTube Our Precious Bandwidth?

Added on by Ash.
I just read an interesting blog from Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0, about the recent YouTube polls, partially regarding potential cost to users should YouTube introduce ads at the start of each video.

Needless to say that it doesnt bode well for YouTube if they did this. I too wouldn't be too happy about it and am a self-confessed media junkie. But is this just the cost of doing business? Can we not come up with more creative ways of monetizing video?

What about this; Incremental random ads where volume of advertising is tied to popularity of a piece of content. So, the less popular videos will have no ads and then randomly show ads with increasingly frequency as the views/popularity increases.

This is on the assumption that people might be more inclined to accept ads for the more popular (and thus theoretically more interesting) videos.

Just my thoughts. I wonder if there is any other compromise?