As Google hunts for new ways to make money from wildly popular YouTube – make that any way to make money from YouTube – it’s started testing ads on the mobile version of the video sharing site.
From Google’s mobile blog:
You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the U.S. and Japan. This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube — it will give you a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising. Our test advertisers will also have an additional branding tool at their disposal and the opportunity to reach the millions of people who visit YouTube every day on their phones.
According to the blog, users watch hundreds of millions of YouTube videos on their mobile devices every month. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that advertising has made its way onto mobiles although it’ll be interesting to see how Google manages the balancing act between screen size and advertising space.