Having paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, Google always planned to add advertising to get its money back (and more). It has finally decided to do it by running overlay ads along the bottom of videos, which sounds obvious enough. Cable TV viewers may already be familiar with the idea, and if it's not ads taking up a strip at the bottom of the picture, it could be a scrolling news ticker or whatever.
However, the idea seems to have upset some people because it's already being used by the rival VideoEgg site. Wired magazine has run a little interview with VideoEgg's chief marketing officer, Troy Young, where he agrees that "YouTube's new overlay advertising strategy is a rip-off of the model VideoEgg pioneered over a year ago." He says VideoEgg is posting a Welcome ad (above) inspired by an old Apple effort, adding that "we filed a patent on [the idea] a while back."
The US patent office is badly broken, so VideoEgg could get a patent on an idea that is patently obvious and for which there would seem to be "prior art". So while VideoEgg is not in any sense a "patent troll" -- it's a real company with real customers -- it could, like Eolas, be awarded truckloads of cash.
But reminding people of Apple's Welcome ad may not be such a good idea. Apple dominated the personal computer market at the time (though the advert's claim that Apple "invented the first personal computer system" is a flat-out lie). However, IBM quickly reduced Apple to a tiny percentage of the market. VideoEgg is already a minnow compared to YouTube, which is backed by Google's billions. Foolish bravado looks out of place.
.jpg?w=600)
