YouTube Getting Serious About This Video Rental Thing

YouTube recently started experimenting with renting video content as a potential new way for content producers to make money, which led to the question: will YouTube be the place to rent movies in the future?

YouTube kicked this initiative off by offering a few independent films from Sundance, an experiment which some saw as a failure, but YouTube appears to have found a success, saying that they increased exposure for the films by about 60%. YouTube is now looking to expand the content that it offers for rental, and is calling upon partners to bring more to the table.

YouTube has invited a small number of additional beta partners in different categories to begin offering videos for rent, and now thousands of videos are available. YouTube offers the following examples: 

• Anime Network - Animated Shows and Movies - example1, example2
• Cerebellum - Education and Business - example1, example2
• Gaiam - Yoga and Fitness - example1, example2
• Rock N’ Learn - Educational - example1, example2
• Bodywisdom Media - Yoga, Pilates, and Fitness - example1, example2
• Taunton Press - Homebuilding, Cooking, Woodworking, and Gardening - example1, example2
• Golflink (Demand Media) - Every Aspect of Golf - example1, example2
• PlaySportsTV - Sports Coaching and Instruction - example1, example2
• Travel Video Store - Travel and Adventure - example1, example2
• Language Tree - Language Instruction - example1, example2

"Through this new offering, content owners now have control over the entire lifecycle of their work," YouTube says. "They can migrate videos from rental to ad supported; they can set the price and rental duration. In short, they can test and customize their distribution to fit their audience's habits and their business' needs."

The company thinks topics and genres with small, but passionate audiences will better monetize with the rental model, as opposed to the ad supported one. They also note that paying users generally expect a longer duration from videos, as well as higher production value.

YouTube's goal is to make rental an option for all content creators, and the company will invite more and more as improvements are made. There is currently an application process that content providers can go through if they want to monetize their videos this way.

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Duplicate Content Owners Catch a New Break from Google

Google announced that it now offering cross-domain support of the rel="canonical" link element. If you are unfamiliar with this link element, Google's Matt Cutts discussed it with us here. Basically, it's a way to avoid duplicate content issues, but until now, you couldn't use it across domains.

"For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to [have] duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects," says John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google Zürich.

Do you have legitimate reasons for having duplicate content? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... about them.

"There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects," he says. "This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel='canonical' link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel='canonical' link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

Mueller gives the following ways of handling cross-domain content duplication: 

- Choose your preferred domain
- Reduce in-site duplication
- Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
- Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable gives three reasons why the addition of cross-domain support for the rel="canonical" link element is really important:

1. Some hosts don't allow webmasters to deploy 301 redirects
2. Some site owners aren't technical enough to implement a 301 redirect
3. In some cases, webmasters do not want to redirect users but rather only search engines (i.e. pagination, weird filtering, tracking parameters added to URLs, etc).

To use the link element, pages don't have to be identical, but they should be similar. According to Google, slight differences are fine. You should not point point rel="canonical" to the home page of the preferred site. Google says this can result in problems, and that a mapping from an old URL to a new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to go.

You should not use a nonindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel="canonical" link element because those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing, Google says. One would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Google also says it's important that these pages aren't disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, because search engine crawlers won't be able to discover the rel="canonical" link element.

Will you find cross-domain support of the rel=”canonical” link element useful? Comment here.


Have You Read This?

> Duplicate Content on Google, Bing & Yahoo

> Google Busts the Duplicate Content Myth

> Internationalizing Without Duplicate Content Worries

Google Tool Shows Where the Eyeballs Go on Your Site

Google has launched a new Google Labs experiment called Browser Size, which is a tool aimed at helping webmasters see how others view their site. Google's official description of the tool says:

Ever wondered what parts of your site can't be seen without scrolling? Browser Size shows you what portion of users can see a give spot on the screen. This is not screen resolution but the area available to the browser - as gathered from www.google.com users.

Here is what it looks like:



"In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page," says Google Senior Software Engineer, Bruno Bowden. "If it's a really important piece, then it's placed 'above the fold,' which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn't readily seen when you first look at the newspaper."

"The same concept applies to browsers as well," he adds. "There's no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a 'Donate' button on a non-profit site. If it's far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don't scroll and will miss it entirely."

To use the tool, simply enter your URL and it will insert your page into the graph showing the percentage of people who are likely to see each area. Don't be surprised if a lot of websites suddenly start shifting to the left.

The tool was one of Google's "20% time" projects. A post on the Google Code blog has some interesting details about how the project came about and grew to what it is.


Have You Read This?

> Duplicate Content Owners Catch a New Break from Google

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Google Ditches PageRank in Webmaster Tools

YouTube May Expand Into TV Show Biz

It's no secret that YouTube's trying to catch up to Hulu in terms of offering premium content; the site's administrators often make a big deal out of movie and TV show additions.  What is under wraps - or at least hasn't been publicized in press releases and blog posts - is that YouTube might also be interested in charging for access.

According to Peter Kafka, "[I]t envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable."

And although negotiations between YouTube and content owners are preliminary, according to Kafka's sources, "both sides seem optimistic, since models for such deals already exist."

Plus, since Hulu is also likely to place some content behind a pay wall, YouTube wouldn't be putting itself at too much of a disadvantage.

Of course, there's no guarantee that this experiment would be successful.  YouTube became so popular by virtue of being free, and the introduction of fees could just turn more people onto less-than-legal alternatives like the Pirate Bay.  Still, Kafka said that YouTube will probably be "one of several outlets trying to get consumers to pay for TV on the Web in 2010."

Have You Read This?

> YouTube Scopes Out Concept Of Movie Rentals

> YouTube On Verge Of Supporting 1080p Videos

> Want To Buy Some YouTube Videos?

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