"Right now, YouTube is not for sale," asserts Julie Supan, the viral video site's senior director of marketing--despite its inability to make significant money from its advertising experiments.
YouTube, with its 80 million videos served per day, is attracting considerable outside attention from advertisers and investors, but like MySpace, it risks compromising its user base if it shows the
wrong mix of ads. Supan knows the challenge is to get the advertising model right: "It's not just a matter of whether or not the advertiser will find value. It's also whether the users find value in
it." In other words, don't expect YouTube to embed commercials at the start or end of videos; Supan says that wouldn't play well with YouTube's community. Over time, Supan said YouTube would create a
new ad model, just like Google. Speaking of which, YouTube is backed by the same investment firm as Google--Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley company. As IDC analyst Josh Martin said in a recent
report, "The truly difficult task for YouTube is to change the entire culture of the viewers that propelled it to overnight success," adding that he doesn't see people's habits changing quickly enough
for YouTube to reinvent itself. Meanwhile, the site's monthly bandwidth costs continue to creep up, running now between $300,000 to $400,000, according to industry insiders.
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