Video-sharing site YouTube will begin selling video games and music, hoping to grow revenues and create new advertising formats.
The company eventually intends to sell music, films, TV shows, games, books, concert tickets and other media products via related video clips on their site. The deal currently involves links to online store Amazon for video games, and to Amazon and iTunes for music.
Electronic Arts’ recently-released
Spore will be one of the first titles to get a link through the new advertising relationships, implying that the scheme will launch in the near future.
According to a
Reuters report, analyst group Piper Jaffray Research has estimated that YouTube could make around $200 million from the move by the end of 2009. With 330 million visitors in August 2008, YouTube has traditionally used advertising as its primary income source.
"There'll be lots of different solutions for lots of different problems," said Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube director of product management. "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."
