YouTube is currently predicted to lose about $500m this financial year (bandwidth!) and is desperately seeking the right ad model to turn a profit of any degree. So after various attempts, YouTube is now trialing a new model called “Choose Your Ad” where a “very small” number of “random videos” give users a prompt at the start of a video to select one of two PAID video ads to watch, this one add will be a longer pre-roll add and then play your video seamlessly.

While if you don’t want to choose and ad, you’ll be greeted with upto 4 short commercial breaks through out your video. It’s a pretty interesting model, similar to that being integrated on Hulu at random intervals offering longer pre-roll advertisements over commercial breaks.

One cool thing about this, is that although the advertiser that gets clicked pays for the ad and not the other, both ads are highlighted for the user to choose, which essentially is free branding, so make sure you have a good title, description and screen shot!

Techcrunch have the full article here and it can also be seen on Google or the related Hulu article here. Not sure if this is the solution as people will always hate watching force-fed-ads online for the next few years, but someone has to se the model right?

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