Jordan Hoffner, director of content partnerships at YouTube, is not happy with advertisers' online ad budgets.
"The spending advertisers are doing on the internet does not equal what people are doing," Hoffner said, speaking at Streaming Media West, an online video conference in San Jose, Calif. "This is disturbing . . . People are spending more time online, but advertisers are not flocking to [the internet] at the same rate. That means that all these people who are doing the work, aren't getting paid for their content."
The crux of the problem, according to Hoffner, is that there isn't a standardized method of measuring traffic.
"We still don't even have 100 percent agreement on what a click or a view is," said Hoffner. "And when is a view a view? In TV, even if ratings are down, they have ratings. Everyone knows what a rating is. But the fact of the matter is [that with online video], there has to be an explanation . . . Once there is a standard in place, then the budgets will start flowing."
We've heard others versions of this song before -- Google has been pretty communicative about YouTube's monetization problem. CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in June that the company still hasn't figured out how to make money off the site, which it acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006.
See Also:
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