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Advertisers Line up at YouTube Killer’s Door

General Motors, E-surance and Royal Caribbean, are among the first advertisers to line-up for the yet-to-be-named “YouTube killer” planned by NBC, News Corp., and Yahoo, among others, according to Ad Age (via MarketingVox).

Advertisers have been wary of buying space on sites like YouTube because consumer-generated clips often contain objectionable content. That marketers signed on to the opportunity so readily underscores the importance of editorial adjacency for marketers.

Cadbury Schweppes, Intel and Cisco are also among the charter advertisers that have signed, writes the Hollywood Reporter (via AdWeek). The site will feature thousands of hours of content from at least a dozen networks and two major film studios. News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin is quoted as saying the undertaking is “the largest advertising platform on Earth.”

One reason marketers moved quickly is that the joint venture resolves one of online video’s biggest problems: the dearth of high-quality online-video content for marketers to buy. That market is still small compared with the $65 billion TV-ad market - eMarketer estimates the online-video market at $775 million this year.

Meanwhile, ComScore’s January numbers indicate nearly 123 million people in the U.S., or 70 percent of the total U.S. internet audience, viewed 7.2 billion videos online. YouTube was the most popular streaming site, with 992 million video streams.