YouTube to sell music, games in revenue push

YouTube had 330 million visitors in August 2008, according to comScore, which measures Internet audiences.

"There'll be lots of different solutions for lots of different problems," Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube director of product management, said in an interview. "We've tested a lot of things already, and we're going to be testing more in the future. Some will work, some won't.

One format with which YouTube is experimenting is InVideo advertising, which runs text ads along the bottom of videos as they play. Other formats include contests sponsored by advertisers and home page video ads.

YouTube executives said pre-roll advertising, where a 10 to 20 second ad runs before a video starts, is not always the best format for some of the shorter video clips on YouTube. But they did not rule out using pre-roll ads altogether.

The company is also betting that its video ID system will help drive advertising. Video ID enables content owners, such as music and TV producers, to know when copies of their video clips are uploaded to YouTube by users, YouTube said. The content owners can then share in advertising generated around that copied clip.

The content owner could also use the video ID system to remove the videos.