Monday, May 21, 2012

Gulf News

Dubai: After celebrating its seventh anniversary today Google-owned YouTube is working on adding advertisements to its UAE domain.

Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion (Dh6 billion) in 2006.

Having a local domain is step one, which we did a month ago. Now we are working on it because we have to go through the legal steps to implement it, Mohammad Murad, regional manager at Google Gulf, told Gulf News.

If Mena was a single country, he said it would be the second biggest after the US and third behind Brazil. The video-sharing site gets 167 million views per day.

YouTube has four billion views per day globally while 800 million people visited YouTube on a monthly basis. In a minute, one hour of video is uploaded regionally and 72 hours of video globally, he said.

According to Abbas Jaffar Ali, Publisher of t-break Media, YouTube is the biggest video site on the internet.

We have broadband connection problems in certain parts of the region. Once that is taken care of, the growth will be even more, he said.

In the Gulf, people are spending three hours on the internet, but most of the content is developed for the TV platform.

Better videos

We believe that once we allow partners to make money in YouTube, then the whole ecosystem will be triggered and users will have better videos posted locally, Murad said.

Right now, YouTube does not make money from its UAE domain. Our aim is to help partners make money, he said.

If you take into account the internet penetration rate in the region which is not very high, the number of uses per internet user in the region is the highest in the world, he said.

Google does not provide content on YouTube, it is the users and partners that provide the content.

According to comScore report, viewers spent an average of 434.8 minutes in April watching video on Google channels.

That represents a small increase of 55 per cent over April 2011.

On Yahoo channels, meanwhile, viewers spent an average of 73.7 minutes in April watching video, nearly double the 37.5 minutes they averaged in April 2011.

YouTube will be considering adding subscription content to its streaming platform in a bid to attract video from larger media corporations, Murad said.

By Naushad K. Cherrayil, Staff Reporter

Gulf News 2012. All rights reserved.