AdAge
While YouTube looks for an answer to monetizing video, it stumbled on something else: how to cash in on its home page.
Google’s behemoth video site started selling its rich-media “masthead” ads back in April. Since then, the ads have become commonplace on the site and a showcase for some of the best online display ads emerging from agencies today.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone given YouTube’s scale. Dominant in video, YouTube.com also happens to be the world’s third-biggest website behind Microsoft’s Live.com (now Bing) and Google itself, according to ComScore.
But while other portals similar in size, such as AOL and MSN, have been scaling back ads, or at least rationalizing them, YouTube pretty much lets advertisers have run of the place, with ads that pop out, expand, play video and invite interactivity. More…