Agencies welcome YouTube Philippines

Content-wise it has secured a number of media owners, including major broadcasters GMA and ABS-CBN, as well as offering two government channels.

Google’s managing director for Southeast Asia, Julian Persaud, described the country’s internet population as probably larger than the population of other Southeast Asian countries.

Within Southeast Asia, Filipinos account for tens of millions of views per day. Globally, over three billion videos are viewed in a day and about 48 hours of videos are uploaded every minute.

Media agencies are extremely buoyant about YouTube Philippines, describing it as a great opportunity for brands to reach consumers.

Joseph Sales, Omnicom Media Group Philippines’ head of platforms said that advertisers are very keen to get onto YouTube. “Until now this has only been possible through Adwords.”

Sales said that the localised YouTube channel is set to have far more provision for ads, “There will be significantly more advertising real-estate, like mastheads and even on the search page.”

Digital manager at ZenithOptimedia Philippines Chinkey Llave agrees that home-page ad placement will be popular but said it remains to be seen how sophisticated the ad-targetting will be.

“In my opinion, it is more important to be able to target, not by YouTube channel, but by user behaviour – and follow the eyeballs,” she said. “As many users do not register for YouTube, it is not so easy to target as compared to Facebook for example.’

Joanna Catalano, head of media solutions & YouTube, Google Southeast Asia, said that new advertising formats, such as skippable ads, were being developed by the video-sharing site to expand user-choice.

Monetization is expected to come from YouTube partners and from ad revenues.
Video revenue will be generated when advertisements are displayed against YouTube partner’s videos.

According to eMarketer, global ad revenue from social networks is expected to reach $5.54 billion, with just under half coming from the US. By 2013, non-US revenues are expected to make up 51.9 per cent of the total, with overall ad revenues close to $10 billion worldwide.