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December 02, 2011

Google Unveils Major Redesign for YouTube

By Oliver VanDervoort, Contributing Writer

Google (News - Alert) appears to be taking on all the technological bigwigs these days. While the search giant will always be known as the company that runs your Android (News - Alert) devices and helps you find cat pictures with witty captions, that's hardly where the company's influence ends. Google has recently teamed up with Apple (News - Alert) in order to topple companies like Sony and Nintendo in the mobile gaming sector



Google has also gone toe-to-toe with Apple with their own music service known as Android Music. Now it appears Google is actually trying to take on Hulu and Netflix in a roundabout way, with their latest redesign of YouTube (News - Alert).

What is actually being called the biggest redesign in YouTube's history was unveiled by Google yesterday. The goal of this new look is to make the site look more like a television. While the redesign was mostly cosmetic, the goal is nothing new for Google. 

The company wants more people to use YouTube on a regular basis. A look that is more pleasing to the eye will hopefully do this. More people using the site regularly means more ad revenue for Google.

Google says that at the moment, YouTube logs three billion video views per day. The company also says that YouTube gets three billion monetized (videos with ads built in) views per week. It is the monetized views that Google is hoping to increase with this latest revamping. 

While Google has never released revenue numbers for YouTube, industry insiders say that the site should earn its parent company somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion in revenues this year.

The basics of the redesign is that the site will now be centered around channels, as opposed to individual videos. Any user will be able to create their own channel and then be able to seed those channels however they want. Where the money is going to come in is when companies or certain individuals pay to have their channels set up and seeded. 

Users will be able to pin up to 10 different channels to their homepages, and the site will suggest other channels (rather than other individual videos) based on the user's viewing habits.





Edited by Jennifer Russell
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