Lakes And Mountains On YouTube – For A Price
If you visit the YouTube homepage on September 18, you should see a video there from Tourism New Zealand and made by Weta Workshop, who brought you much of Lord of the Rings and King Kong. (If the video’s gone by the time you read this, you can still watch it here.)
Wow, New Zealand looks beautiful. I want to go! Wait, I’m already here. Although I don’t spend my days commuting to work over snow-capped mountains, or my lunch breaks kayaking smoothly through a silent mirror lake.
What I find interesting is that they reportedly paid $NZ450,000 (US$320,000) for that 24-hour homepage slot, as well as a special channel page valid for three months. Seems rather steep. Did they know you can upload videos for free, and the best ones make it to the ‘most-viewed’ section? And call me old-fashioned, but isn’t the point of YouTube that it’s user generated, user selected and user rated content?
Still, good on them for being modern and stuff, and obviously being on the homepage for 24 hours will result in a flood of traffic. My budget would not cover such a promotion but it’s exciting to see companies here seeing the benefits of advertising online, especially on an international site. Has been rather a long time coming.
And for those who are not overly concerned with the state of online advertising in NZ, it’s a pretty video. 
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Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
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