Joost advertisers seek rights assurances

Advertisers on Joost, the internet television service being developed by the founders of Skype, the web telephony group, are insisting they will not run their commercials next to programmes whose rights have not been cleared. The experience of Joost will fuel debate over whether mainstream advertisers will spend heavily on fast-growing video-sharing websites such as YouTube, which carry film and television clips that have not been cleared for copyright.

Although YouTube, and similar sites, has amassed a huge if fragmented audience, particularly among the youth market that is attractive to advertisers, it has been the subject of copyright infringement lawsuits from content companies whose material is being uploaded on to the web without commercial clearance.

At the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, Eric Clemenceau, vice-president advertising sales of Joost EMEA argued that Joost would expect to charge premium rates because, once it had attracted enough users, it would offer advertisers the change to target consumers according to the demographic, geographical and viewing choice information they would have built up on the service.

Earlier, Nate Elliott, a senior analyst at Forrester, the research group, told the same event that take up of online video was growing quickly in some parts of Europe, but remained in its very early days.

[Via Euro2day]