YouTube now to show ads on the videos

The good days of commercial free Video streaming is bygone ! Youtube now to show ads on the videos. After google spent 1.67 big ones to purchase it, it was expected they would monetize youtube more to justify its price tag. According to Wikipedia page on youtube it makes an annual turnover of about 10 Millions while word on the blogosphere put it around 15 which means google has to wait 100 years just to break even !

Now these ads will be an eyesore without a doubt but atleast these ads will be "animated overlays" as they put it and not pre-roll. According to youtube

These are animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you're interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you're in full control of your YouTube experience.

Already this is creating controversy with the video owners. youtube user irabnut posted a comment on the Youtube blog "That really sucks! i don't want my artistic masterpiece to be filled up with cheesy unrelated ads. The site will become less attractive."

Youtube is already compromising on the video quality to save on bandwidth it is to be seen if this additional income through ads will make it less bandwidth stingy and improve the quality of video.

Will this eyesore make people move to other video sharing sites such as Metacafe (which is offering rewards for video makers) Vimeo , and newly launched Blip.tv ? Only time will tell !