There was big news earlier today in the online video world, with comScore announcing that Facebook had passed Yahoo in terms of monthly unique visitors.  Only YouTube/"Google sites" of course remains in first place, and this afternoon a YouTube product manager took a moment to discuss the effectiveness of the site's promotion tools.

On the YouTube Blog, Jay Akkad explained an experiment's setup: "Our team selected 20 partner videos who upload fresh videos regularly and then we drove as many views to them as possible with a cost per view (CPV) of $0.03."

Their findings?   Among other things, "Promotion at $0.03 per view increases views per day by 30x when compared to two weeks prior to promotion."  Also, "Partners in the test got 46,000 subscriptions that were directly attributed to sessions with a Promoted Video click.  The cost averaged out to be between $4-$6 a subscriber."

That's pretty impressive stuff.

YouTube's no doubt hoping to attract more advertising dollars with those figures, and it's likely to succeed.  Most organizations can afford a test on that scale, especially if they've already sunk time and money into creating a series of videos.

Good luck if you choose to try the promotion tools out for yourself.