YouTube to end Director onsite services on October 31

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YouTube is retiring its Director onsite services as of October 31 and has stopped accepting any new video ad production projects.

First launched in June 2015, the video creation service offered by YouTube was expanded to more than 170 US cities in March of this year. Through the Director onsite program, companies that committed to spending at least $350 on YouTube via Google AdWords would have access to professionals who would script, shoot and edit a 30-second video ad at no charge to the advertiser.

A YouTube spokesperson sent the following statement on the decision to end the service:

We care deeply about helping all businesses create and share their stories with the world on YouTube, and we are working hard to build scalable solutions to continue helping them do that.”

Thomas Tourville, a digital marketing specialist at RevolutionParts, first alerted Marketing Land to the notice on YouTube’s Director onsite page that the service is no longer taking on new projects. Tourville had used YouTube’s Director onsite service when he was the director of paid digital at P3 Agency.

“The YouTube campaigns were mostly used for brand lift, but they did result in some new business,” says Tourville. He said all the directors he worked with through the service had online portfolios and had been given very specific time allotments and script parameters per project.

Earlier in his career, Tourville had worked with a vendor that contracted with Google, and says the most common objection they received from SMBs when trying to convince them to launch a YouTube campaign were the high costs of video, before any money was ever spent on ad placement.

“The onsite program was an extremely effective way to get clients excited and committed to video advertising,” says Tourville.

Per the announcement on YouTube’s Director onsite page, YouTube is recommending advertisers check out its YouTube Playbook for Small Business and third-party services as alternative resources. YouTube is has been moving away from rolling out tools that incentivize SMBs to do more video ads this year, and instead focusing on building out video ad metrics and tools for creators — like the ability to livestream broadcasts from a desktop and giving creators more ways to monetize content.

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