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I worked on the YouTube ads team (Adsense for interactive media, or AFIM) for a while. The people on that team saw themselves as helping to create the replacem
by jjwiseman 13y ago
I worked on the YouTube ads team (Adsense for interactive media, or AFIM) for a while.
The people on that team saw themselves as helping to create the replacement for TV, and part of that job was to create a model that paid the expense of hosting and distributing video, with all the associated infrastructure, as well as allowed for content-creators to make money--basically to make it a viable business. Ads are the primary means of making that happen, but they've experimented with other methods too.
They care a lot about the user. To contradict another poster, they don't show ads at every opportunity; that's not the Google way, and they have detailed data on exactly how many ads you can show people before they stop watching videos. They also strongly encourage advertisers to use skippable ads--they make users happier and they encourage more interesting ads (it's also not entirely true that advertisers don't have to pay for skipped ads).
The only thing worse than YouTube ads are the non-Google attempts at video ads. Google's UI and targeting are 10x better than the competition I've seen.
(It's been over a year since I've worked on AFIM, so my info could be out of date.)
- davedx 13y agoInteresting info. > they have detailed data on exactly how many ads you can show people before they stop watching videos Anecdote: YouTube caused me to install AdBlock. I'm not anti-advertising, but the amount of ads shown on YouTube videos reached a tipping point for me sometime earlier this year. I'm not ad-intolerant, but it seemed to be showing me more ads per minute than on regular TV shows. Of course that's just perception.
- option_greek 13y agoAlso, ads in middle of a video are much better than ads at the start of a video. Some times it becomes ridiculous when the ad length is 1/4th of video length (though most become skippable after 5-10 secs).
- stumacd 13y agoI'd like to think I'm in the same boat here. I understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the unskippable 30 second ad for a short video was the end of the line.
- Amadou 13y agoI read that line as "they have detailed data on how to maximize total ad views where losing some % of viewers is made up for by the increased number of ads watched by the remaining viewers."