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Depends on the price the advertiser pays. You can buy an ad, or you can buy and ad in a particular place. You don't get to choose what Dear Abby says in her column, but enough advertisers like what she says (that is the people who read her column and see the ad next to it - they don't care what she actually says, just that it gets eyeballs for him).

News papers have long had a policy that the advertising department wasn't in control of what the news said. The advertisers didn't like it, but they went with it because they knew that it is what the eyeballs wanted.

There is a fine line though - some companies didn't advertise in particular outlets (playboy is an obvious example), which might or might not work out for them.

The question is where is the power. YouTube is acting like they don't have power here, but in fact they do: a large portion of video is on YouTube, and so if YouTube says "too bad, either give us your money or not", the advertisers will need to pay up. Of course there is a cost to youtube in doing that which they might not be willing to pay: some advertisers will say no. Others will tell youtube fine, but we are not willing to pay as much as you could get if we got more control who sees us.

The question isn't where the power is, the question is how much money does YouTube need/want?




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