Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

YouTube is now allowing certain users to submit far longer videos than the old ten-minute maximum that has been the case for the site since its inception. Videos of up to 1GB are now going to be shown on YouTube, which would allow for clips that approach an hour and a half in duration.

Concurrently with this announcement, YouTube is courting directors at the Los Angeles Film Festival, attempting to get young and up-and-coming directors to put their content on the site.

“Howard Buttelman, Daredevil Stuntman” is a one hour 35 minute “clip” that has garnered over 1.1 million page views. The idea for YouTube (and their monetization scheme) is that users will see far more ads when viewing the site for longer periods of time. Fairly simple, really.

However, the ten-minute limit is there for a reason, as Michael Learmonth of SAI points out, partly due to the fact that it breaks up potential copyright infringements by the mere fact that most content that would be pirated is longer than ten minutes, and few people would really want to bother with a bunch of broken up content. Also, it keeps bandwidth costs at a minimum.

It does not appear that YouTube is going to change their policy of not paying for content. While Hulu attracts networks by sharing in the ad revenue, YouTube is hoping the prospect of exposure draws in higher quality content. YouTube attracts nearly 70 million visitors a month at this point. They are just hoping you stick around a little longer.

Story via SAI and Fortune.

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