• Advertising Age, Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12 PM

YouTube will never be confused with a pure search engine, but with the power of owner Google behind it, it should come as no surprise that it is excelling at the function of search itself. In fact, the video sharing site is now technically the No. 2 search site on the Web, recently surpassing Yahoo.

So it should also come as no surprise that Google is taking advantage of the development to try and make some money. YouTube now features text-based search ads precisely like the ones that turned Google into a phenomenon. Users who search YouTube receive paid results on the right side of the screen, just as with AdWords, which link to an advertiser's paid channel and are sold on a pay-per-click basis.

But will it work? When people perform Google searches they are looking for information that they are often happy--or even prefer--to receive from a paid advertiser (odds are anyone searching "roach infestation" isn't just curious). But YouTube searchers are looking for entertainment. Still, the experiment has a huge upside given the site's traffic, and rumors are that Google is still refining the process.

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