Music videos now on YouTube app for Android
Starting today, we’re welcoming VEVO’s extensive library of official music videos from artists like Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kanye West and U2 onto the YouTube 2.0 app for Android, available around the world. To watch these videos your mobile phone needs to be running Android 2.2 (Froyo). Although the latest YouTube native app comes pre-installed on many Android 2.3 devices (like the Nexus S), you can also install it manually by searching for 'YouTube' in Android Market and downloading the latest version.
We’re also launching several new features to make it easier to discover and enjoy music videos on mobile:
- Music videos are now clearly marked with a ‘music note’ badge
- While enjoying the video you can read ‘artist bio’
- It’s easy to discover more tracks from the same artist using ‘artist tracks’ tab
- You’ll find similar cool bands on the ‘related artists’ tab
In addition to these features, tens of thousands of YouTube partner videos will also now have pre-roll ads appear on the YouTube 2.0 app for Android. This not only expands distribution opportunities for partners like VEVO, but also opens up more revenue to partners distributing their content to mobile. Although we’ve tested ads on mobile over the years, this is our largest step in mobile monetization to date.
The mobile ad market is growing fast and set to surpass $1 billion in the US in 2011. We also have a new milestone to share - YouTube now exceeds 200 million views a day on mobile, a 3x increase in 2010.
As the world goes mobile and more people watch videos on their smart phones, we expect more partners will take advantage of these new mobile advertising capabilities and make more of their content available across more devices.
Our next step is to let partners run ads more broadly across other mobile platforms, beyond Android native apps.