Stolen From PayPal
Hurley: Before YouTube, I had never seen embed code for video. Where did it come from? I hate to keep referring to PayPal, but we had payment buttons. We allowed people to cut and paste payment buttons and put them on any website, blog, auction listing.
For us, that would expose more people to our brand, to our service. It would lead people back to our site. We took that same idea and applied it to video embeds.
We had payment buttons at PayPal. We took that same idea and applied it to video embeds.
The Giant YouTube Ad
Hurley: The video embed gave people the opportunity to have a video solution they could take with them. Even if you hadn't uploaded the video yourself — if you found an interesting video that related to your blog post, or personally represented you, like the music you liked — you could put it on your MySpace page or your site.
People could just come and grab this content, put it on their site. And the entire player was basically a giant YouTube ad. That's how we viewed it. That was our marketing budget.
The clickable area to play the video inline was just the little play button in the middle. But the rest of the video would click back to our site.
The entire player was basically a giant YouTube ad. That was our marketing budget.