We covered the earlier earnings announcement here.
From the call: Echoing YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley’s comments at Davos last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during Wednesday’s earnings call that the video-sharing site would start to share profits with uploaders “sometime this year.” According to Marketwatch, Schmidt said there was no formal program yet but one would begin “sometime this year.”
Updated: From the conference call:
Schmidt talked at length about YouTube, and said that the early returns on the acquisition are “very positive.” But he did not have financial details. Asked about using anti-piracy techniques on YouTube, he said: “With respect to things like the fingerprinting, one of the things that we are very concerned about is we want to respect the copyright ownership, especially the ownership issues and the authors of copyrighted works. We are in development of a number of technologies that will help us there: audio fingerprinting, video fingerprinting. It’s in various stages of being rolled out. That is an area of big research in the computer science community and also a significant investment here at Google.”
Also, he mentioned that Google’s growing revenue is due to fewer, smarter placement of advertising. “We are showing fewer ads per search on a much higher quality and much better monetization…The targeting and the technical work that we are doing is producing better return for advertisers, better revenue for us, with even fewer advertisements on a comparison basis.”