YouTube mobile traffic triples in 2010, 200 million views a day

YouTube now exceeds 200 million views a day on mobile, after seeing its traffic triple in 2010. Google's costs are clearly increasing for the video sharing website, so the company is doing what it does bets: adding more ads.

Tens of thousands of YouTube partner videos will now have pre-roll ads appear on the YouTube 2.0 app for Android. This expands distribution opportunities for YouTube's partners and also opens up more revenue to partners distributing their content to mobile. Google has been testing ads on mobile for many years now, but this is the search giant's biggest step in mobile monetization. YouTube expects more and more partners to take advantage of these new advertising capabilities as the world goes more mobile.

This was apparently a necessary step for Google to take in order to add VEVO's extensive library of official music videos to the YouTube 2.0 app for Android. To watch these videos, you'll need at least Android 2.2 (codenamed Froyo) and the latest YouTube native app. It comes pre-installed on many Android 2.3 devices but can also be installed manually by searching for YouTube in the Android Market. Here's the new feature list for the new app:

• Music videos are now clearly marked with a "music note" badge
• While enjoying the video you can read "artist bio"
• It's easy to discover more tracks from the same artist using "artist tracks" tab
• You'll find similar cool bands on the "related artists" tab

YouTube plans to let partners run ads more broadly across other mobile platforms other than Android. That being said, the company would not give a timeframe for when that will occur