Google to Mess With YouTube Success

They are an especially bad fit for YouTube, too, because of how people watch videos there. Browsing videos on YouTube is like channel-surfing on cable TV. There's an element of risk that the next video you click on -- just like the next cable channel you switch to -- won't be any good.

Yet people keep flipping ahead to the next video clip, believing that one of them, at just the right moment, will have something worth watching.

Now imagine if you were channel-surfing and you had to watch a three-second commercial every time you changed the channel. Would that cure your channel-surfing addiction? You bet it would.

Also, a three-second ad isn't yet proven enough to lure in advertisers. Three seconds is time enough to flash a logo. Advertisers for whom the 30-second spot is a highly polished, almost scientific process may not take to the brutally truncated format. It's like asking an advertiser to rent an entire billboard but use only a tenth of its space.

Some ad agencies will experiment with three-second format, however. And they will surely come to the conclusion that the way to make a three-second ad stand out is to jam it as full as possible with blaring, flashing content. The result? Obnoxious ads, the equivalent of the two-stepping cowboys, every time you watch a YouTube video.

YouTube and Google are smart enterprises, so there may be something else going on here. Maybe the pre-roll idea is just a gambit to keep the media companies at bay. Maybe the media giants are insisting on pre-rolls, knowing full well it will sabotage YouTube's success, or maybe YouTube is floating this trial balloon knowing full well it will fail, so it can say to media companies, "Well, we tried."

Whatever the reason behind this idea, it's not a positive for Google. The company's success is based on advertising that is useful, or at least nonintrusive. Its future in online video rests on an ad format that is similarly user-friendly, so it can share revenue with content owners large and small.

But this idea, however nascent, feels like a drastic misstep in the making.