Google wants to turn YouTube into a profit machine

Like it or not, Google must now continually sate its shareholders lust to grow even bigger, and to that end CEO Eric Schmidt has announced their goals for the remainder of the year. One of the most challenging is perhaps to turn YouTube into a cash cow, a plan that brought enough faith into Google that it raised their share value by 4.7% this Wednesday.

But how do they plan to do this? “New products” for YouTube that will be aimed at generating advertising revenue, Schmidt argued. Some hints of this have already been seen, for example with YouTube contributors being able to put their videos in line with advertisements, sometimes even getting a cut as an incentive. But as you can guess, so far this has not been enough.

Monetization continues to be one of the greatest challenges for so-called Web 2.0 services. Some others like YouTube face huge amount of popularity which so far has not helped enough to transform that into dollars. The full interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt can be found here.