Worse is when ad technology is prioritized and is set up more stably/reliably than the content itself. It’s one thing to sit through an ad before <i>successfully</i> watching something but quite another to put up with that and then see some obscure error code instead of the content you “paid” for with your ad eyeballs. I’ve had things fail 2 or 3 times, each time replaying the same ENTIRE ad without a hitch but then failing to deliver.<p>This is why people cry no tears when ad companies complain. If you want to stick crap in my way, the experience had better be flawless.
Youtube resorting to interruption ads in the first place was equivalent to Tesla deciding to ship each car with a small internal combustion engine bolted on.<p>Considering the strides Amazon and Netflix have made with original content, I think Youtube should be viewed as having missed the boat in a pretty big way. All of the promising platform innovations that seemed worth waiting for now seem to have been put on hold in favor of prioritizing Google's ad revenue maximization.<p>The biggest of these are "autoplay" and the silly way that it chooses content to play next.<p>There seems to be some notion that consumers want to sit in front of youtube and gaze at it while it plays some bizarre mix of low quality user generated content and videos that consumers have watched before, while interspersing annoying ads that encourage the user to tap/click to dismiss the ad.<p>It's hard to imagine an experience that creates more annoyance. It's as if a fly is released into the room at the start of each video that lands on your ear, and you must either put up with it or exert effort to get rid of it.<p>Regular TV commercials should be viewed simply as a result a near monopoly for years, with viewers having no choice but to suffer through ads, and advertisers having no choice but to overpay for them.<p>I actively avoid watching youtube for these reasons, and consider it (as a product) a lot like SourceForge -- someone just trying to milk every ad dollar possible with no concern for the quality of the experience.<p>I hope this article means that there has been an inflection point and YouTube cannot continue to increase revenue by emulating the dated paradigm of broadacast TV.<p>Facebook, it seems, has already eaten Google's lunch on live video.
I haven't watched such ad in a long time apart from TV which does not have uBlock available.<p>I would sign up for youtube red but alas, tis not available to hostile foreign countries such as Canada<p>I wonder if they are doing this because youtube red is killing it....can't beat netflix in terms of contents but if they gave you access to entire Play movies and tv shows then that would be a game changer...I don't even watch Amazon Prime shows apart from The Grand Tour and Man. I'm quite fond of Netflix's UX and UI.
You know, I really wish I could buy Youtube Red for my friends more easily. It drives me up the wall when one of them is watching youtube and some obnoxious ad plays at 2x the volume of anything else they've been doing. I already pay for Youtube Red myself primarily because I hate video / audio advertising with a passion, but I can't control what anyone else in the room does with their money I guess.<p>Advertising is the sole reason I stopped watching television. It's unbelievably distracting when I enter someone else's house and they have their TV playing all the time. How do you not get sucked in? I guess I was desensitized to it earlier in life, but now I'll gladly pay subscription fees to distance myself from that racket.
YouTube ads wouldn't bug me nearly as much if there was some more variety. I must have seen the same stupid MileIQ ad a thousand times by now. Surely they have more content available than this?
Too late, I've already given up on watching anything on YouTube unless I'm desperate. Yeah, I know there's YouTube Red. But at $120/year, well, that's a Netflix-level subscription, and I don't get even a tenth of the value I get out of Netflix from YouTube.
The funniest thing about their ads is watching my daughter learn to tap the button again and again until they are gone.<p>It's hard to imagine how Google or TV will convince the world to accept let alone <i>want</i> their ads for much longer when a generation is growing up with ad blocking and Netflix.
I wonder how long it will take before there's an actual YouTube competitor (and yea, that's not Vimeo or Vidme). Something quick and easy like imgur for video would be fantastic. That being said, this is an interesting move. Is YouTube profitable yet?
I doubt we can get a glimpse into the data. I'm speculating here - but it is likely that the overall attention span is too short, and those who pay for long unskippable ads are not getting their moneys worth, hence the change.
They would have been more tolerable if there were more variety to the ads. For the last few days every YouTube video I've watched has been prefixed with the same unskippable ad, a 30-second spot for Lucky Charms cereal that wants so badly for you to think it's an episode of <i>Adventure Time</i> that you can smell the flop sweat from across the room.<p>If you're going to force me to watch the same ad over and over, at <i>least</i> make it an ad that doesn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out with a rusty razor blade.
In other news, campaignlive.co.uk still has full-screen pop-up ads.<p>I think a good place for ads would be at the end of the video. I know many people will say that then many ads would never be seen. But I think you should consider the emotion associated with your product when your ad is at the beginning:<p>If I click on a funny 1-minute cat video, a front-loaded ad first of all makes Youtube act like it's broken. I clicked a link to play a certain video, and it didn't play. Instead something else played. For a brief moment, there is a feeling of brokenness. Then there is a feeling of frustration: you tried to accomplish something, and you were blocked (though temporarily).<p>The second reason it is so irritating is that it seldom has something to do with you: it's advertising something you don't want. It's like someone who strikes up a conversation with you about something that they find interesting, but they didn't bother to consider whether it interests you. (Google's AdSense doesn't seem to work well in Youtube.)<p>The third reason it is so irritating is a sense of proportion. An hour-long documentary could do with a 30-second commercial. A 30-second Youtube video seems overburdeded with even a 5-second ad.<p>If you put your ad at the end, I am in a good mood, because I just finished my cat video. Also, I'm thinking of what to watch next. So an ad playing in the background doesn't bother me as much. Maybe it's even subliminal, since I'm not really concentrating on it. That's just what the advertisers want! ;)<p>I think ads at the end would also be more in the same spirit as the text-only ads on Google Search, that it would be better to have an ad go unnoticed than have an ad that is interfering. Actually I think the genius is that text-only ads fit in better with text-only search results. The user is already in careful-reading mode. So in fact I think they are more likely to run across the text-only ad than some flashing image, which they would have quickly learned to ignore.<p>I finally signed up for Youtube Red, despite my pennypinchingness. I think I'll stick with it. It includes also all the free music I want, on Google Play. Through that I found a new album by an obscure band that I always liked. It's only $10 a month, and if you can buy a family plan for $15.
Adblockers have kept YT totally-ad free on desktop for years. I'm surprised Google hasn't found a workaround for this. I rarely access the Youtube app because of the constant ads; plus, I don't find the mobile experience to be as good as the desktop one.
A long time back, HTTP Switchboard stopped blocking preroll ads, for me in the US. Is there a rule I can add back in?<p>Edit: Just figured it out. Blocking this with an adbock rule fixes it at as a logged-in user, in the US, using Chrome.<p><pre><code> https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info*</code></pre>
Url changed from <a href="http://bgr.com/2017/02/17/youtube-video-ads-unskippable/" rel="nofollow">http://bgr.com/2017/02/17/youtube-video-ads-unskippable/</a>, which points to this.