YouTube adds the symphony, removes the porn

Google keeps searching for a way to make money off of YouTube, but so far, nothing seems to stick. In November, it announced a new AdSense-like auction-based video sponsorship program, which seemed promising. But perhaps the stumbling block has always been the type of content hosted on YouTube. Advertising is all about branding, but how much can you bolster a brand that's advertising beside videos of pratfalls and Japanese dogs riding bikes. This week, Google made some key changes to YouTube that just might give the site (and its advertisers) a better class of clientele.

First, it's looking to widen the YouTube audience a bit by adding some high-brow classical music interest. It announced the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, along with a contest to find the world's best classical musicians. The idea behind the new orchestra is to provide an open platform for musicians all over the world to audition and participate. As Google's Ed Saunders explains in this National Post article:

"Our idea is a collaborative orchestra," says Google's Ed Saunders. "Musicians will be auditioning online from all over the world through our new site [youtube.com/symphony]. The winning players will then gather in New York next April to debut a piece for orchestra at Carnegie Hall. This is a new kind of opportunity for musicians."

And a new kind of opportunity for YouTube. At the same time as the symphony announcement, Google also announced stricter measures aimed at removing--or at least demoting--sexually explicit material from YouTube. In the blog announcing those measures, the YouTube team says:

We've been thinking a lot lately about how to make the collective YouTube experience even better, particularly on our most visited pages. Our goal is to help ensure that you're viewing content that's relevant to you, and not inadvertently coming across content that isn't.

To that end, it's implementing stricter standards for mature content, making videos it deems "sexually suggestive" available only to viewers 18 and over. It's also algorithmically demoting sexually suggestive content and profanity, improving the thumbnails so viewers have a better idea of what they're getting into, and providing better enforcement of metadata rules, so people can't "game view counts by entering misleading information in video descriptions, tags, titles and other metadata."

So Google's making a concerted effort to clean up YouTube and attract a more PG (ie lucrative) audience. Time will tell if it works--and starts showing a profit.

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