The world is waiting to see how Google plans to make money from YouTube. Increasingly innovative in the slap-an-ad-on-it department, Google is a victim of its own success, relying on clicks when YouTube is better as a straight branding vehicle, just like its television predecessor.

Google’s billions have relied primarily on the click, but the company is finding a different kind of audience frequenting YouTube—one that may not be so inclined to view or click on an ad, whether or not it’s placed mid-video, and perhaps especially not if it’s placed mid-video.

Some have suggested a search system like the one Google revolutionized to begin with: users search for specific keywords and there appear ads relating to those keywords. Heather Hokpkins, Hitwise’s Senior Analyst, reveals that the top search terms on YouTube traditionally aren’t the most clickable terms around.

About 72 percent of YouTube searches are music related, which isn’t the best news. In addition to legal battles with music labels and Viacom, terms like “lil wayne” or “beyonce” historically don’t produce a lot of clicks.

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