Future of TV Briefing: Where YouTube Shorts stands among advertisers on eve of creator monetization program’s launch

By Tim Peterson

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the state of advertisers’ adoption of YouTube Shorts as the platform prepares to share ad revenue with Shorts creators.

Shorts-sighted

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Shorts-sighted

The key hits:

YouTube’s Shorts ad product has provided limited features for advertisers since officially launching last year.
Shorts ads have primarily been aimed at direct-response advertisers as brand advertisers wait on audience growth, improved controls and more robust reporting.
Despite the limitations, agency executives expect advertiser investment in Shorts ads to increase.

Not even advertisers have a feel for how much ad revenue YouTube Shorts creators can expect to receive after the platform launches the ad revenue-sharing program for its TikTok clone on Feb. 1. That’s because advertisers don’t necessarily know how much money they’re spending on ads running in the Shorts feed at the moment.

Asked on Monday to what extent advertisers are spending money on Shorts ads right now, VaynerMedia svp and head of investment Jon Morgenstern replied, “That is a great question because the exact answer, at least to our understanding of it right now, is it’s unclear.”

Morgenstern wasn’t the only agency executive I spoke to this week who gave that answer. And the reason that ad buyers don’t exactly know how much money advertisers are spending on Shorts ads is that YouTube has yet to give advertisers the option to buy Shorts ads specifically or to see what share of their overall YouTube campaigns ran as Shorts ads.

In an emailed statement, Nicky Rettke, vp of product management for YouTube’s ad business, confirmed that advertisers cannot currently buy Shorts-only ad placements and that YouTube does not provide Shorts-specific reporting metrics.

“We do not break out performance on YouTube Inventory (home feed vs. in-stream vs. Shorts) as our campaign strategies are designed to drive performance at scale across Google properties and help customers find the right media mix to drive that performance with automated bidding,” Rettke said.

The long and short of Shorts ads

Suffice it to say, a little more than eight months after YouTube officially rolled out ads in the Shorts feed globally last May and as YouTube starts to give Shorts creators a cut of that ad revenue, the YouTube Shorts advertising business remains pretty nascent. But to be clear, it’s not prenatal.

YouTube has been pitching advertisers on advertising in the Shorts feed, which garnered 1.5 billion users per month, as of grandparent company Alphabet’s third-quarter 2022 earnings call in October. In PMG’s 2023 planning meetings with the platform during the fourth quarter, “the conversation was about how to forecast investment for the Shorts product, and quite honestly there was a group of us in the room that said we can’t provide a forecast because it’s something that’s new and we just need to see more robust data, more robust reporting, other brands using it,” said Natalee Cecil, head of brand media at PMG.

There are brands using Shorts ads, though, …read more

Source:: Digiday