SimonWaldman.net

So, a Zettabyte is a thousand Exabytes, which, as I’m sure you know is a thousand Petabytes; which is a thousand Terrabytes; which is a thousand Gigabytes. Which I think means a Tettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Anyway, by 2012 according to the rather excellent white paper, Approaching the Zettabyte Era from Cisco (.pdf here), about half a Zettabyte of data will flow over the internet each year. The main driver for this, as you might suspect is Video. YouTube in 2008, for example, is responsible for more data than the whole of the internet in 2000.They are predicting three surges in video consumption. The first – internet to the PC (which we’re in the middle of); the next internet to the TV (barely begun) and finally video communications.The net result is they’re forecasting that video over the net will increase sixfold by 2012. And, while we’re chucking around hand stats nuggets as a result: the internet will be 75 times bigger in 2012 than in 2002.

These days, I think I watch more ads on YouTube than on the TV. Particularly when they’re as fine as this offering [via Lunar BBDO's If this is a blog....]

Anyway – the merits of this ad aside, it’s clear that YouTube has become effectively an on demand supply of the world’s best ads (and frankly, plenty of the not so great ones as well) – giving a new lease of digital life to the traditional TV ad – at zero media cost to the advertiser.

Meanwhile, the plans to commercialise YouTube all seem to revolve around overlays and other fiddly tricks .

Now, the ads on there are among the most viewed bits of video that aren’t offensive, shocking or just shockingly amateur. In other words – they are prime for monetising.

So the question is – in order to make money – will they put ads over the ads?