10 ms·

YouTube to stop 30-second unskippable ads

89 points by devinp 10y ago

wnevets 10y ago
I'm so glad I have youtube red through my google music subscription, unskippable 30 second ads sound just dreadful.
- baldfat 10y ago
  My favorite subscription above netflixs and Amazon Prime. It kills me to think that most people have this all backwards. They think content creators get less with YouTube Red and is bad for all creators. If people only understood how little per view they are paid for. Also people are just married to their Spotify playlist and can't get out to see that Google Play Music is a fabulous service. I have the family plan for my older kids and wife but YouTube Red is the best deal. EDIT: Mobile Benefits for YouTube Red - Playback with the screen turned off - Download videos - YouTube Music No Ads -YouTube Gaming
  - coldpie 10y ago
    I would love to see some stats or analysis from a YouTube content creator about views from Red subscribers. Has anyone put out anything like that?
    - baldfat 10y ago
      20 times higher payout per viewer. "“I can now clearly determine how much Red views are worth vs normal views. If I did my math correctly, since Red started, a Red view is on average worth 20x that of a normal ad view. This calculation is based on taking the total revenue the channel has generated via Red and dividing it by the total number of Red views since Red was first launched, then multiplying that number by 1000 to find the effective CPM of Red.” http://lipanitechnologies.com/2017/01/03/youtube-red-helping-content-creators-earn-money/ http://lipanitechnologies.com/2017/01/03/youtube-red-helping...
      - pkroll 10y ago
        I couldn't stay on that page for more than a few seconds before the insane, random animation background made me physically recoil.
  - Veratyr 10y ago
    > Also people are just married to their Spotify playlist and can't get out to see that Google Play Music is a fabulous service. There's actually a service that allows you to move your playlists: https://freeyourmusic.com/ https://freeyourmusic.com/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
aphrax 10y ago
BGR Page is complete with a 30 second Ad that auto plays..at least that's the case on mobile
dang 10y ago
Url changed from http://bgr.com/2017/02/17/youtube-video-ads-unskippable/ http://bgr.com/2017/02/17/youtube-video-ads-unskippable/, which points to this.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
Good. I was just closing the tab when I saw these.
- rhizome 10y ago
  If this was a driver, Google will apparently be the first site to account for bounces in their advertising strategy.
binarymax 10y ago
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.
brilliantcode 10y ago
I haven't watched such ad in a long time apart from TV which does not have uBlock available. I would sign up for youtube red but alas, tis not available to hostile foreign countries such as Canada 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.
pwython 10y ago
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?
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  I never see ads cause of YouTube Red, and I have it because I had Google All Music Access which I think is better than all other music services I've tried.
- wnevets 10y ago
  >Is YouTube profitable yet? IIRC it has been for years.
  - skinnymuch 10y ago
    I've only seen info on it not being profitable assuming you actually account for its actual bandwidth, etc. Do you know where you may have seen it's profitable?
    - wnevets 10y ago
      Looks like I was kinda wrong. http://www.investors.com/news/technology/youtube-valuation-soaring-profits-blurry-as-facebook-amazon-loom/ http://www.investors.com/news/technology/youtube-valuation-s... > But is YouTube profitable? Google has never said. Nor does it disclose viewership data or other financial metrics beyond a few broad statements. > “There’s substantial uncertainty, particularly over the profit levels at YouTube, whether it’s break-even or if they're doing modest operating margins," RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney told IBD. “They have a lot of content royalty costs, massive bandwidth costs, storage costs, processing costs.
      - skinnymuch 10y ago
        Yeah interesting but we will likely never get anything close to a number.
smacktoward 10y ago
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 Adventure Time that you can smell the flop sweat from across the room. If you're going to force me to watch the same ad over and over, at least make it an ad that doesn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out with a rusty razor blade.
mikeash 10y ago
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?
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  Lol, MileIQ is probably bidding the most on your demographic.
- imglorp 10y ago
  That's the hulu strategy. Wear you down with such low quality, repetitive ads you'll beg for the adfree upgrade.
  - imchillyb 10y ago
    That's the hulu strategy. Wear you down with such low quality, repetitive ads you'll...stop using their service. FTFY!
    - Neliquat 10y ago
      Yup, just felt like cable again. Cancelled and have not looked back. Their 'network' programming is forgettable and mostly filler.
  - rchaud 10y ago
    That's the Spotify strategy as well, at least when they're advertising their own premium service to free-tier users. They intentionally make the audio ads have the worst possible narrators and background music.
- kiwidrew 10y ago
  It's even worse if you're an expat living in a foreign country (e.g. Hong Kong). Despite being signed in to my Google / YouTube accounts (where Google knows my language preferences) every. single. advertisement. was completely irrelevant to me because it was in Cantonese. Total waste of my time and the advertiser's dollars. Not long after, I installed uBlock Origin and haven't looked back.
passivepinetree 10y ago
This article made me realize how heavily I rely on uBlock Origin. I haven't thought about youtube ads in a long time.
- dukeluke 10y ago
  I kind of wish there was a way to unblock specific YouTube users from uBlock. I have a handful of entertainers that I like enough to intentionally support them by watching ads, yet I've found no simple way to do that without manually disabling uBlock for a specific video and re-enabling it afterwards.
  - zacmps 10y ago
    Unfortunately because of YouTube's URL scheme I don't think it would be possible.
    - rasz_pl 10y ago
      You could make it work quite easily with 2 stage script. Load page, grep for channel name, whitelisted = set $wastemytimelikeitwasworth20centsperhour$=1 and force reload . Make ublock check for this variable every time it parses pages. but why would you?
  - bittercynic 10y ago
    Many 'tubers accept donations. You could support them _and_ not damage your psyche with ads ;)
  - deelowe 10y ago
    Why not get red? It comes with free music streaming and eliminates all ads. It's not much at all.
    - leo90ae 10y ago
      If you are paying its not free
    - 10y ago
_nato_ 10y ago
I wish fixyt.com was still working, but a quick /watch?v=SLUG_ID appending to it still saves the day on videos-with-ads I just cannot bare.
JMiao 10y ago
the worst offenders are the 30 second horror film trailers. nope.
vonuebelgarten 10y ago
> Ads shorter than 30-seconds, including the 20-second spots, can be made unskippable. uBlock Origin will continue to serve me well.
- vvggff 10y ago
  Look, bandwidth costs money. If you don't want to see ads, just subscribe to Youtube red. Don't be an asshole.
  - imglorp 10y ago
    Yeah we should probably whitelist youtube to sponsor the vids there. That's reasonable. HOWEVER the real assholes are whoever is serving bloat and ads that will do anything to get malware onto your machine and track your every breath. This is really why we're blocking.
    - vonuebelgarten 10y ago
      That's the actual problem with these ads: bloat, bandwidth usage, javascript, profiling, de-anonymization, tracking, attacks on privacy, sound, unskippable videos, etc. I will feel no remorse for adblocking until advertisers go back to static, single-request, non-tracking, non-targetting ads.
  - whatismyip 10y ago
    When it's available in my region, sure. It's coming up to 2 and a 1/2 years old and still only available in 5 countries.
    - ReverseCold 10y ago
      End of October 2015 - Feb 2017 Huh, that's about right. It feels like it was released after that.
  - crestedtazo 10y ago
    Surely this comment is against HN guidelines and should be removed....
makecheck 10y ago
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 successfully 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. 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.
- notatoad 10y ago
  This is one thing that youtube does really well though - on some other sketchy video player you never know whether the video will play even if the ad will (the worst is when don't let you know you're geo-blocked until after playing their ad) but on youtube the video always plays just as well as the ads for me.
  - stingraycharles 10y ago
    That's because Youtube natively integrates the pre-roll into its video player, while it's far easier for ad servers to just wrap the entire video player itself and (temporarily) replace it with their ad content. Not saying it's right, but it's just the status quo of the moment.
    - waqf 10y ago
      The status quando, perhaps — or the Zeitstand.
      - fjdlwlv 10y ago
        What does that mean?
  - dandelany 10y ago
    True, but Youtube suffers from its own class of usability issues around ads/video. Eg. the other day I was watching a YT video and noticed that the top-voted comment was a particularly weird/creepy comment - so I absent-mindedly clicked the "thumbs down" next to it. Suddenly I was whisked away to a login page with no warning, interrupting the video. I immediately clicked "back" - and was forced to re-watch the entire ad before resuming my video. Stuff like this infuriates users - I'm trying to actively engage, and being punished for it?!
AjithAntony 10y ago
A long time back, HTTP Switchboard stopped blocking preroll ads, for me in the US. Is there a rule I can add back in? Edit: Just figured it out. Blocking this with an adbock rule fixes it at as a logged-in user, in the US, using Chrome. https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info*
benologist 10y ago
The funniest thing about their ads is watching my daughter learn to tap the button again and again until they are gone. It's hard to imagine how Google or TV will convince the world to accept let alone want their ads for much longer when a generation is growing up with ad blocking and Netflix.
hourislate 10y ago
I guess this means my 13 year old won't have to watch a full 30 second add for Viagra any more.
grandalf 10y ago
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. 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. The biggest of these are "autoplay" and the silly way that it chooses content to play next. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Facebook, it seems, has already eaten Google's lunch on live video.
zeta0134 10y ago
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. 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.
- lucideer 10y ago
  I have literally never heard of Youtube Red before reading this commend. Granted, I live in Ireland, where it's seemingly unavailable but... why isn't this promoted more widely?
  - saurik 10y ago
    You seem to have answered your own question, but you live in Ireland, where it's unavailable: if you live in a place where it is available, it is difficult to not know about it, because YouTube tries to up-sell you on it with house ads.
    - lucideer 10y ago
      Perhaps, but I get very little of my knowledge from ads, and probably most of it from non-Irish media, blogs, and similar sources, hence my surprise. This is the first time I've seen the service mentioned on HN, which seems surprising in itself.
  - rchaud 10y ago
    Because Google today is Microsoft from the late 90s-mid 2000s; a million projects in every single possible market, with little to no unification across the commmon platform. Android OS alone has no less than 3 Google-made messaging apps: Hangouts, Allo and Duo.
pmoriarty 10y ago
I never see ads on youtube, since I use youtube-dl to download the videos first before I watch them, and the downloaded videos never have ads.
Animats 10y ago
They're changing to 20 second unskippable ads. Big deal.
Kiro 10y ago
Why are they so slow on releasing YouTube Red in more countries?
mikestew 10y ago
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.
combatentropy 10y ago
In other news, campaignlive.co.uk still has full-screen pop-up ads. 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: 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). 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.) 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. 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! ;) 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. 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.
- icebraining 10y ago
  I've had YouTube show me ads at the end of videos. It certainly beats ads during the middle, but it's also often more jarring than ads at the start. Say you put some soft music playing and tab away, then it ends and suddenly you get a loud, fast-paced ad - I usually respond by closing the tab immediately.
GoToRO 10y ago
Maybe they will make the ads seekable, at least in the past. I saw some good ads and I wanted to go back but it's not possible.
rchaud 10y ago
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.
db48x 10y ago
Just use an adblocker, then you don't need to wait on them to do anything.

89 points by devinp 10y ago

wnevets 10y ago

I'm so glad I have youtube red through my google music subscription, unskippable 30 second ads sound just dreadful.

baldfat 10y ago
My favorite subscription above netflixs and Amazon Prime. It kills me to think that most people have this all backwards. They think content creators get less with YouTube Red and is bad for all creators. If people only understood how little per view they are paid for. Also people are just married to their Spotify playlist and can't get out to see that Google Play Music is a fabulous service. I have the family plan for my older kids and wife but YouTube Red is the best deal. EDIT: Mobile Benefits for YouTube Red - Playback with the screen turned off - Download videos - YouTube Music No Ads -YouTube Gaming
- coldpie 10y ago
  I would love to see some stats or analysis from a YouTube content creator about views from Red subscribers. Has anyone put out anything like that?
  - baldfat 10y ago
    20 times higher payout per viewer. "“I can now clearly determine how much Red views are worth vs normal views. If I did my math correctly, since Red started, a Red view is on average worth 20x that of a normal ad view. This calculation is based on taking the total revenue the channel has generated via Red and dividing it by the total number of Red views since Red was first launched, then multiplying that number by 1000 to find the effective CPM of Red.” http://lipanitechnologies.com/2017/01/03/youtube-red-helping-content-creators-earn-money/ http://lipanitechnologies.com/2017/01/03/youtube-red-helping...
    - pkroll 10y ago
      I couldn't stay on that page for more than a few seconds before the insane, random animation background made me physically recoil.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  > Also people are just married to their Spotify playlist and can't get out to see that Google Play Music is a fabulous service. There's actually a service that allows you to move your playlists: https://freeyourmusic.com/ https://freeyourmusic.com/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

aphrax 10y ago

BGR Page is complete with a 30 second Ad that auto plays..at least that's the case on mobile

dang 10y ago

Url changed from http://bgr.com/2017/02/17/youtube-video-ads-unskippable/ http://bgr.com/2017/02/17/youtube-video-ads-unskippable/, which points to this.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

Good. I was just closing the tab when I saw these.

rhizome 10y ago
If this was a driver, Google will apparently be the first site to account for bounces in their advertising strategy.

binarymax 10y ago

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.

brilliantcode 10y ago

I haven't watched such ad in a long time apart from TV which does not have uBlock available. I would sign up for youtube red but alas, tis not available to hostile foreign countries such as Canada 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.

pwython 10y ago

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?

giancarlostoro 10y ago
I never see ads cause of YouTube Red, and I have it because I had Google All Music Access which I think is better than all other music services I've tried.
wnevets 10y ago
>Is YouTube profitable yet? IIRC it has been for years.
- skinnymuch 10y ago
  I've only seen info on it not being profitable assuming you actually account for its actual bandwidth, etc. Do you know where you may have seen it's profitable?
  - wnevets 10y ago
    Looks like I was kinda wrong. http://www.investors.com/news/technology/youtube-valuation-soaring-profits-blurry-as-facebook-amazon-loom/ http://www.investors.com/news/technology/youtube-valuation-s... > But is YouTube profitable? Google has never said. Nor does it disclose viewership data or other financial metrics beyond a few broad statements. > “There’s substantial uncertainty, particularly over the profit levels at YouTube, whether it’s break-even or if they're doing modest operating margins," RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney told IBD. “They have a lot of content royalty costs, massive bandwidth costs, storage costs, processing costs.
    - skinnymuch 10y ago
      Yeah interesting but we will likely never get anything close to a number.

smacktoward 10y ago

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 Adventure Time that you can smell the flop sweat from across the room. If you're going to force me to watch the same ad over and over, at least make it an ad that doesn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out with a rusty razor blade.

mikeash 10y ago

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?

adamnemecek 10y ago
Lol, MileIQ is probably bidding the most on your demographic.
imglorp 10y ago
That's the hulu strategy. Wear you down with such low quality, repetitive ads you'll beg for the adfree upgrade.
- imchillyb 10y ago
  That's the hulu strategy. Wear you down with such low quality, repetitive ads you'll...stop using their service. FTFY!
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    Yup, just felt like cable again. Cancelled and have not looked back. Their 'network' programming is forgettable and mostly filler.
- rchaud 10y ago
  That's the Spotify strategy as well, at least when they're advertising their own premium service to free-tier users. They intentionally make the audio ads have the worst possible narrators and background music.
kiwidrew 10y ago
It's even worse if you're an expat living in a foreign country (e.g. Hong Kong). Despite being signed in to my Google / YouTube accounts (where Google knows my language preferences) every. single. advertisement. was completely irrelevant to me because it was in Cantonese. Total waste of my time and the advertiser's dollars. Not long after, I installed uBlock Origin and haven't looked back.

passivepinetree 10y ago

This article made me realize how heavily I rely on uBlock Origin. I haven't thought about youtube ads in a long time.

dukeluke 10y ago
I kind of wish there was a way to unblock specific YouTube users from uBlock. I have a handful of entertainers that I like enough to intentionally support them by watching ads, yet I've found no simple way to do that without manually disabling uBlock for a specific video and re-enabling it afterwards.
- zacmps 10y ago
  Unfortunately because of YouTube's URL scheme I don't think it would be possible.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    You could make it work quite easily with 2 stage script. Load page, grep for channel name, whitelisted = set $wastemytimelikeitwasworth20centsperhour$=1 and force reload . Make ublock check for this variable every time it parses pages. but why would you?
- bittercynic 10y ago
  Many 'tubers accept donations. You could support them _and_ not damage your psyche with ads ;)
- deelowe 10y ago
  Why not get red? It comes with free music streaming and eliminates all ads. It's not much at all.
  - leo90ae 10y ago
    If you are paying its not free
  - 10y ago

_nato_ 10y ago

I wish fixyt.com was still working, but a quick /watch?v=SLUG_ID appending to it still saves the day on videos-with-ads I just cannot bare.

JMiao 10y ago

the worst offenders are the 30 second horror film trailers. nope.

vonuebelgarten 10y ago

> Ads shorter than 30-seconds, including the 20-second spots, can be made unskippable. uBlock Origin will continue to serve me well.

vvggff 10y ago
Look, bandwidth costs money. If you don't want to see ads, just subscribe to Youtube red. Don't be an asshole.
- imglorp 10y ago
  Yeah we should probably whitelist youtube to sponsor the vids there. That's reasonable. HOWEVER the real assholes are whoever is serving bloat and ads that will do anything to get malware onto your machine and track your every breath. This is really why we're blocking.
  - vonuebelgarten 10y ago
    That's the actual problem with these ads: bloat, bandwidth usage, javascript, profiling, de-anonymization, tracking, attacks on privacy, sound, unskippable videos, etc. I will feel no remorse for adblocking until advertisers go back to static, single-request, non-tracking, non-targetting ads.
- whatismyip 10y ago
  When it's available in my region, sure. It's coming up to 2 and a 1/2 years old and still only available in 5 countries.
  - ReverseCold 10y ago
    End of October 2015 - Feb 2017 Huh, that's about right. It feels like it was released after that.
- crestedtazo 10y ago
  Surely this comment is against HN guidelines and should be removed....

makecheck 10y ago

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 successfully 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. 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.

notatoad 10y ago
This is one thing that youtube does really well though - on some other sketchy video player you never know whether the video will play even if the ad will (the worst is when don't let you know you're geo-blocked until after playing their ad) but on youtube the video always plays just as well as the ads for me.
- stingraycharles 10y ago
  That's because Youtube natively integrates the pre-roll into its video player, while it's far easier for ad servers to just wrap the entire video player itself and (temporarily) replace it with their ad content. Not saying it's right, but it's just the status quo of the moment.
  - waqf 10y ago
    The status quando, perhaps — or the Zeitstand.
    - fjdlwlv 10y ago
      What does that mean?
- dandelany 10y ago
  True, but Youtube suffers from its own class of usability issues around ads/video. Eg. the other day I was watching a YT video and noticed that the top-voted comment was a particularly weird/creepy comment - so I absent-mindedly clicked the "thumbs down" next to it. Suddenly I was whisked away to a login page with no warning, interrupting the video. I immediately clicked "back" - and was forced to re-watch the entire ad before resuming my video. Stuff like this infuriates users - I'm trying to actively engage, and being punished for it?!

AjithAntony 10y ago

A long time back, HTTP Switchboard stopped blocking preroll ads, for me in the US. Is there a rule I can add back in? Edit: Just figured it out. Blocking this with an adbock rule fixes it at as a logged-in user, in the US, using Chrome. https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info*

benologist 10y ago

The funniest thing about their ads is watching my daughter learn to tap the button again and again until they are gone. It's hard to imagine how Google or TV will convince the world to accept let alone want their ads for much longer when a generation is growing up with ad blocking and Netflix.

hourislate 10y ago

I guess this means my 13 year old won't have to watch a full 30 second add for Viagra any more.

grandalf 10y ago

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. 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. The biggest of these are "autoplay" and the silly way that it chooses content to play next. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Facebook, it seems, has already eaten Google's lunch on live video.

zeta0134 10y ago

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. 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.

lucideer 10y ago
I have literally never heard of Youtube Red before reading this commend. Granted, I live in Ireland, where it's seemingly unavailable but... why isn't this promoted more widely?
- saurik 10y ago
  You seem to have answered your own question, but you live in Ireland, where it's unavailable: if you live in a place where it is available, it is difficult to not know about it, because YouTube tries to up-sell you on it with house ads.
  - lucideer 10y ago
    Perhaps, but I get very little of my knowledge from ads, and probably most of it from non-Irish media, blogs, and similar sources, hence my surprise. This is the first time I've seen the service mentioned on HN, which seems surprising in itself.
- rchaud 10y ago
  Because Google today is Microsoft from the late 90s-mid 2000s; a million projects in every single possible market, with little to no unification across the commmon platform. Android OS alone has no less than 3 Google-made messaging apps: Hangouts, Allo and Duo.

pmoriarty 10y ago

I never see ads on youtube, since I use youtube-dl to download the videos first before I watch them, and the downloaded videos never have ads.

Animats 10y ago

They're changing to 20 second unskippable ads. Big deal.

Kiro 10y ago

Why are they so slow on releasing YouTube Red in more countries?

mikestew 10y ago

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.

combatentropy 10y ago

In other news, campaignlive.co.uk still has full-screen pop-up ads. 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: 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). 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.) 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. 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! ;) 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. 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.

icebraining 10y ago
I've had YouTube show me ads at the end of videos. It certainly beats ads during the middle, but it's also often more jarring than ads at the start. Say you put some soft music playing and tab away, then it ends and suddenly you get a loud, fast-paced ad - I usually respond by closing the tab immediately.

GoToRO 10y ago

Maybe they will make the ads seekable, at least in the past. I saw some good ads and I wanted to go back but it's not possible.

rchaud 10y ago

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.

db48x 10y ago

Just use an adblocker, then you don't need to wait on them to do anything.