A quarter of all YouTube videos are now being watched on mobile devices but how can content owners actually make money from this?  This is the crux of an intriguing video interview with YouTube’s director of product management Shiva Rajaraman that GigaOM filmed at its Mobilizie conference.

The 17-minute video is well worth a watch and you can see it here.  For those short of time, however, Rajaraman essentially explains how the company is managing the shift towards viewing on mobile devices and what the advantages to advertisers are of this change.

These include a less restricted advertising environment than TV, the closest format to online video viewing. Advertisers are not limited to the artificial 30-second windows of TV and they can choose to reach their target with one big splash, rather than bombarding consumers with the same ad, time and again.

Rajaraman also explains how content owners have to think about the shift towards mobile viewing – creating a video channel in a standard desktop design, for example, is foolish, while they must think about which devices their content will appear on.

For example, YouTube no longer allows uploaders to publish to discrete devices as it wanted to stop the user-unfriendly experience where some videos can only be seen from a desktop.