Anyone else sick of ads on Youtube?

[Brian Elfert]

I'm really sick of the number of ads Youtube is putting in their videos now. For a short video they just put one ad at the beginning and I can handle that. My beef is they started putting ads about every four minutes in longer videos. Any hour long video has 16 or 17 breaks for ads in it. Even broadcast TV doesn't stop for advertising that often!

I used to use Youtube to listen to music. I quit doing so when they started inserting so darn many ads. I have to constantly flip back to my Youtube browser window to skip an ad, or I have to listen to a 15 second ad. some of the ads now for non-profits are four to six minutes now, but at least you can skip them after five seconds. I think the amount of ads they are inserting is backfiring because people like me just quit using Youtube altogether. I was slightly irritated when they first started doing it with ads every 8 to 10 minutes, but every four minutes is over the top.

[Keith Outten]

Gentlemen,

I just removed several posts concerning ad blocking software.

Please do me a favor and refrain from discussing ad blocker software here at The Creek. The majority of our funding comes from advertisers and they expect our support in return. If The Creek loses our advertising sponsors we will have no choice but to implement a fee based subscription service and I already know that the vast majority of our Members are not in favor of that kind of change here.

I expect that Google expects people to support their program as well in exchange for free access to their videos and music. Maybe Google should offer a means of eliminating advertising for subscribers which is what we have available here.

[Wade Lippman]

It's free. If you don't like it, don't use it.
If people do stop using it as you say, they will either put in less ads or go out of business.

[Rich Harkrader]

Among many other things, that's not YouTube putting the ads in. The content provider that created the video has chosen to monetize their content. Non-monetized videos will have no ads or one ad at the beginning, which you can usually skip.

[Brian Elfert]

Among many other things, that's not YouTube putting the ads in. The content provider that created the video has chosen to monetize their content. Non-monetized videos will have no ads or one ad at the beginning, which you can usually skip.

The ads are definitely inserted by Youtube. They have the same skip box after five seconds and all that. I know Youtube pays people who upload videos if they get enough views so maybe that impacts how many ads are inserted. I recently looked at over 20 videos all around an hour. Only one of them did not have breaks for ads every four to eight minutes. The ad breaks are marked by a yellow mark in the player on the time bar.

Of those 20 videos I looked at, I did not watch more than a minute of any of them because I knew there would be too many ads. If they had a reasonable number of ads like maybe every 10 to 15 minutes I would have watched at least a few of them for the full hour or so.

[Val Kosmider]

Gentlemen,

I just removed several posts concerning ad blocking software.

Please do me a favor and refrain from discussing ad blocker software here at The Creek. The majority of our funding comes from advertisers and they expect our support in return. If The Creek loses our advertising sponsors we will have no choice but to implement a fee based subscription service and I already know that the vast majority of our Members are not in favor of that kind of change here.

I expect that Google expects people to support their program as well in exchange for free access to their videos and music. Maybe Google should offer a means of eliminating advertising for subscribers which is what we have available here.

There is nothing wrong with a reasonable amount of quality advertising from companies which contribute products to a demographically appropriate audience. If I come to Sawmill Creek and I see a quality ad for a Grizzly table saw I understand their targeting, and appreciate that they are showing me, a woodworker, products which might be suitable for me.

That is a while different situation than pulling up a You Tube video and getting bombarded with ads for headache drugs, Ford vehicles, Cadillac, somebody's phone plan, cruise services...and a host of random things of which I have no interest. It brings to mind that the advertisers are wasting their money, and the viewers are doing everything they can to eliminate the obscene intrusion into their lives. Somebody out there monitors every key stroke I make at my computer, you cant tell me that they cant target me with advertising, if they feel they have to, with things which might be of interest to me.

[Dan Hintz]

Other than those tiny "suggestion" boxes that pop up in videos, I don't believe I have EVER seen an ad in the middle of a YTvideo. Of course, I use a tightly-set program of the type we're not supposed to discuss. But I have no intention of buying anything through an ad, so there's no market lost on me. When I want something, I search for it direct.

[Rich Harkrader]

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/94522?hl=en

[Brian Henderson]

Among many other things, that's not YouTube putting the ads in. The content provider that created the video has chosen to monetize their content. Non-monetized videos will have no ads or one ad at the beginning, which you can usually skip.

YouTube absolutely puts those ads in, the channel owner chooses to turn ads on or off, but they are provided by YouTube. Generally, I don't care about a reasonable number of ads, but a lot of places get utterly obnoxious. If you watch live shows on UStream, for example, they will cut the stream every 30 minutes and show you ads that you can't skip through, such that you miss actual content. Those ads deserve to be blocked because they are entirely intrusive.

[Frederick Skelly]

It's free. If you don't like it, don't use it.
If people do stop using it as you say, they will either put in less ads or go out of business.

I keep coming back to Wade's point here - its free. If I come over to your house near dinnertime, and you invite me to stay for a meal, I need to eat what's being served, don't I? It doesnt matter if the food is tasty, if I might never buy it in a restaurant, or whether I get enough to suit me. I accepted your invitation and sat down at your table. Im not trying to be a wise guy or anything- it just seemed sort of similar.
Fred

[John Lanciani]

In simple terms, if you're not the customer you are the product. If you're not paying, someone else is.

[Brian Henderson]

In simple terms, if you're not the customer you are the product. If you're not paying, someone else is.

Yet I never agreed to be a product. Whatever YouTube's business model, nobody asked me. I never agreed to watch ads. There is no signed agreement that I would watch their ads in exchange for free access to watching videos. YouTube, like all other ad-driven sites, is selling advertising based on potential views, not guaranteed views. There's no way to guarantee views, even if they could stop people from using ad blockers, nothing says that the people watching the video don't just get up and leave the room when the ads come on.

[Brian Elfert]

Yet aren't plenty of people here paying? I mean, $6 a year isn't much, but still, paying is paying.

Keith seems to be implying that he doesn't get enough money from the contributors to pay the bills. Thus, you see ads if you don't pay.

[Frederick Skelly]

Yet I never agreed to be a product. Whatever YouTube's business model, nobody asked me. I never agreed to watch ads. There is no signed agreement that I would watch their ads in exchange for free access to watching videos. YouTube, like all other ad-driven sites, is selling advertising based on potential views, not guaranteed views. There's no way to guarantee views, even if they could stop people from using ad blockers, nothing says that the people watching the video don't just get up and leave the room when the ads come on.

I dont know who owns YouTube, but Im guessing its a for-profit company. If that's correct, I really dont understand your frustration here. You seem to be saying that you expect them to provide you with free videos, just because you called up their site. Why would a commercial firm do that? In addition, you might (maybe) have given them permission to show you ads simply by calling up the site. Im no lawyer, but I wouldnt be surprised to see such a thing in their "terms and service" wording somewhere on their site.
Very few people Ive met are willing to work full time for free.

Respectfully,
Fred

[Myk Rian]

I dont know who owns YouTube,
Youtube owns Youtube. That's what they do.

[Garth Almgren]

I dont know who owns YouTube, but Im guessing its a for-profit company.

Google bought it for about $1.65 billion in 2006, so yeah they're going to want to make their investment back. :)

[Brian Henderson]

I dont know who owns YouTube, but Im guessing its a for-profit company. If that's correct, I really dont understand your frustration here. You seem to be saying that you expect them to provide you with free videos, just because you called up their site. Why would a commercial firm do that? In addition, you might (maybe) have given them permission to show you ads simply by calling up the site. Im no lawyer, but I wouldnt be surprised to see such a thing in their "terms and service" wording somewhere on their site.
Very few people Ive met are willing to work full time for free.

Respectfully,
Fred

Google owns YouTube. And yes, I expect them to make money, but there's a difference between having a business plan that allows one to make money, and making a business plan and expecting others to alter their behavior so they make money. If they want to put the whole site behind a pay wall, that's up to them. They just won't have nearly the traffic they have now, that's why they don't do that. They may want people to look at their ads, they don't have any means to force people to do so. If they decide to change their business model, then users get to re-evaluate whether they continue to use the site. Welcome to the wonderful world of business.

[Brian Henderson]

Google bought it for about $1.65 billion in 2006, so yeah they're going to want to make their investment back. :)

They wouldn't have paid that much if they didn't think they could make their money back.

[Brian Elfert]

I have no beef with Youtube showing ads to cover their costs and make a profit. My beef is with them stopping long videos every four minutes for ads which equates to 16 or 17 ads in an hour. I no longer watch any long videos on Youtube because of the ads. If broadcast TV stopped for ads 16 or 17 times an hour I think their viewership would go way down.

[Larry Frank]

"No such thing as a free cigar" unfortunately, ads pay for the service. If the ad is short at the start of a video, that is OK.

I expect them to increase ads just like TV has. Currently, there is about 15 minutes of ad in a one hour show. We record all the shows we like and then fast forward through ads.

We can probably add the commercials to the same category as death and taxes.

[Brian Elfert]

When I go to news web sites I won't click on any news story that is only available in video form. First you have to watch a 15 to 60 second ad and then spend several minutes listening to the story. I can usually read the story on the screen far faster than I can watch the video.

[bill kaminski]

It's free. If you don't like it, don't use it.
If people do stop using it as you say, they will either put in less ads or go out of business.

Agree...can't say it any better

[Jay Santos]

The ad frequency/length are not proportional to the free service IMO. I invite you to dinner 100 times and each time all you had to do was help wash dishes, but every dinner past 100 I sneak in a plate from my breakfast...eventually you will catch on realize that is not a bargain anymore. I work for their competition and we use very similar strategies to gauge the tolerance level of the viewer. There are analytics that measure the ratio of ads to completed views and scale up and down advertisements based on tolerance. Right now, people are not fet up enough yet. Youtube will keep pushing the envelope until the equations start spitting out numbers that indicate potential revenue loss. They just play with numbers, numbers, numbers :)

[Ole Anderson]

Youtube owns Youtube. That's what they do.
From Wikipedia: In October 2006, Google Inc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google) announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock), and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006

I may be wrong here, but it is my understanding that YouTube has an engine that scans every upload for copyrighted video and music and will outright take down a video that has an obvious infringement or it will place an ad in that video as a cost of doing business. That is why many videos don't have ads as they don't have music. Some ads are just annoying little pop ups that you close with a quick click on the "X" others are full up-front ads you must wait for. An "official video" (Toby Keith's I Love this Bar for example) may have no ads, while the same song posted by someone else has an ad. But some times there is just no logic as to why one video had an ad and others don't.

Bottom line, YouTube needs a mechanism for paying for the cost of hosting something like 100 hours of uploaded video content every hour (or is it per minute?)

[Brian Elfert]

I may be wrong here, but it is my understanding that YouTube has an engine that scans every upload for copyrighted video and music and will outright take down a video that has an obvious infringement or it will place an ad in that video as a cost of doing business. That is why many videos don't have ads as they don't have music. Some ads are just annoying little pop ups that you close with a quick click on the "X" others are full up-front ads you must wait for. An "official video" (Toby Keith's I Love this Bar for example) may have no ads, while the same song posted by someone else has an ad. But some times there is just no logic as to why one video had an ad and others don't.


This is probably the answer here. I am sure the music I have been listening to on Youtube is a copyright violation. I wonder why Youtube doesn't just remove the video instead of loading it down with ads?

I signed up with Spotify to get music legally and might pay them the $5 per month at some point for unlimited music. Sony used to have their MyPlay service that was free for any song from a Sony artist, but they started only playing the first 30 seconds of songs a few years back. I think after 30 seconds the artist has to be paid a royalty so that is probably why they stopped allowing full songs.

[Rich Enders]

USA Today had a story in today's issue about a women (Judy?) who posts a new U-Tube how to video each week about knitting. She is able to pay her annual (California) property taxes with the revenue she receives as a result of the advertising during her videos. And all along I thought those video providers were sharing for the love of sharing...