Youtube

Partnerships

YouTube has a partnership program where the company works with other companies as content providers to maximize visibility and revenue from their video channels. The YouTube Partner Program allows users to "enable your channel for monetization," earning revenue from ads on YouTube, according to the company (2014). Thus, companies that produce ads will allow YouTube to place ads on the videos, and then YouTube will share some of the revenue generated from the ads with the partner. Thus, YouTube works with content providers of all types to generate revenue from video views.

YouTube is owned by Google. Thus, the partnership program works along the same principles as Google AdSense. The users are shown ads based on whatever Google knows about the user, and about the people who view that video. The more Google knows, the more closely-targeted the ads can be. This can be powerful, but it definitely requires the partner company to create a strong channel, something that drives more traffic to YouTube and to Google. An entire industry has emerged for companies that produce content for YouTube channels.

YouTube's partnership program is popular, but it is not without its criticism. While the program does allow people to earn money from the ads, there are many who feel that they do not earn enough, and YouTube has been accused of lacking transparency with respect to how it pays out on its Partnership Program, according to Lazarus (2012). This presents a challenge to the reputation of the program, which needs to be profitable for the partner companies as well as for YouTube in order to fend off competition from other video-hosting sites.

References

Lazarus, D. (2012). Trying to make dollars and sense out of YouTube's partner program. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 8, 2014 from http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/28/business/la-fi-lazarus-20120529

YouTube. (2014). Working together. YouTube. Retrieved April 8, 2014 from https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/creator-benefits.html