YouTube to sell music and video games

Televisionpoint.com Correspondent | New York
YouTube, the world's most popular video-sharing site, will start to sell music and video games and experiment with new advertising formats to grow revenue.

The Google-owned business is taking the first steps toward building an e-commerce service through which it will sell music, films, TV shows, video games, books, concert tickets and other media-related products featured on the millions of videos on YouTube.

Visitors to YouTube.com can buy songs from music videos they watch on the site by clicking on buttons that take them either to Amazon.com MP3 store or Apple's iTunes store. YouTube users will also be able to buy video games, such as Electronic Arts sci-fi game Spore through the Amazon link.

Amazon and iTunes will share revenue with YouTube when users buy content through the partnership. Investors have been asking Google when it would start to generate meaningful revenue and earnings from YouTube, for which the Web search leader paid $ 1.65 billion in 2006.

YouTube had 330 million visitors in August 2008, according to comScore, which measures Internet audiences.

"There'll be lots of different solutions for lots of different problems. We've tested a lot of things already, and we're going to be testing more in the future. Some will work, some won't." says Shishir Mehrotra, director, product management, YouTube.

One format with which YouTube is experimenting is InVideo advertising, which runs text ads along the bottom of videos as they play. Other formats include contests sponsored by advertisers and home page video ads.