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YouTube Launches Ads You Can Skip
wiredmikey writes "A new format that YouTube has been testing for a while officially launched today. YouTube is launching TrueView, a new ad format that lets users skip over ads they aren't interested in — and advertisers are actually okay with it. When a TrueView ad unit begins playing, you'll notice a five second countdown timer — as soon as that's up, you'll see an arrow that will let you skip the remainder of the ad and get back to the content you wanted to see, or you can choose to keep on watching the ad."
Please don't show them to me, you're just wasting my time and your bandwidth.
Put up an image for a few seconds then take it down.
Or buy a banner ad along the side like normal spammers.
So... in the event that the advertisement is less than five seconds in length, you can't skip them.
I guess AdBlockPlus blocks video ads too...
There are ads users want to see?
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
I can tell in two seconds if it's an ad I've already seen, and in that case, forcing me to watch it again is just annoying me and wasting your bandwidth.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
While most of us would say we watch TV for the show, not for the advertisement, there are certain ads and products and movie trailers that do catch our attention. This idea of letting you choose which ads you do or don't want to see the whole of allows the marketer to target ads towards you all the better. And after 5 seconds you have all the product experience you need -- the next 25 seconds is essentially extra money an advertiser has spent on their commercial.
In fact, if we had five 5 second commercials instead of five 30 second commercials on TV, advertisers would probably save a lot of money and not lose any marketing value.
Remember when Google was still new, and people said 'I don't mind their ads - they're unobtrusive, and they're often actually relevant?' I actually clicked on a few Google ads, but I haven't for several years (although I did click on one when I google'd my name, and it told me that I could buy me on eBay). I'd search for something, and there would often be an ad for someone selling whatever it was that I was interested in buying.
Today, I saw an ad at the start of a video hosted on YouTube. The ad was for IE9. Now, considering the fact that IE9 only works on Windows, and I visited it from a Mac (something quite apparent from the user agent string that my browser sent to Google), you'd have thought that it would be pretty obvious that I was not in the target market.
You'd think with the massive amount of personal information that Google is collecting about everyone that they'd be able to do a bit better than that.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I NEVER use any websites that place any ads in their videos... ever. I don't care how much stuff they have that I want to watch. I go find one that has no ads... wonder how many others feel and do the same thing....
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865/
nuff said.
So at 5 seconds everyone participates in a no-opt-out survey on whether or not the ad interests them. No wonder advertisers like it! They get to sell their products to everyone for 5 seconds at a cut rate, to known-interested parties for X seconds at a normal rate, PLUS info on which ads get the most dropouts, least dropouts, and presumably WHEN they drop out.
...OK with it?
I think not.
I will certainly make use of that feature. If extended to commercial TV, the ability to skip commercials would be a boon for my television watching habit. What I do is to mute the set whenever a commercial starts or is about to start. I can even tell when it's time for one.
What also troubles me is the fact that commercials air at a louder speaker volume than the program they replace on the set. Troubling indeed. Why they do that I have no idea.
Another bad thing is that in an hour of programming, about half of that hour is covered by commercials. Sometimes, the host will say..."We'll be right back..." [commercial for 5 minutes]...then return to say just one or two sentences and alas...[another 3 minute commercial].
Insane folks...insane!
Surprised this story isn't already tagged blipvert.
The adds will have to have the greatest impact within the 5 second mandatory period to be effective. Basically, just shorter ads.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft had specifically asked for that ad to be shown to Mac users. After all, you're a potential new customer for Windows.
How is this "letting users" skip ads, compared to the existing Youtube popups we can close instantly?
In other news, the chocolate ration has been increased. Go Oceania!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
so i will shut off ad-block to see your ad and then disable it. right. we already don't see your ad.
It will fail skipping the ad or clicking that button will make it think you clicked the ad itself, opening the website of the advertiser.. or the button will simply fail working or the worst case scenario i've had too much of: only being able to see the ad, not the content itself...
from TFA "a new ad format that lets users skip over ads they aren’t interested in "
I'm not interested in any ads so can I just skip out of all the ads?
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Don't you remember? Blipverts kill people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
Advertisers love internet ads for one reason. They are able to measure the effectiveness of the advertisements and pay for the advertising accordingly. Advertisers are going to like this because if someone isn't interested in the ad they are only paying for a five second ad instead of the minute that they would normally always have to pay for. Users like it because they can skip most of the ads so it is a win-win. The only party that loses out is Google because they won't make as much revenue, but they probably figure the increase in traffic will off set the loss. In that case its a win-win-win.
And not to forget: keeping the viewer's 100% attention just so they don't miss the skip button once it appears. Forcing the viewer to interact with the ad is probably more worth than them actually watching the remaining 15s of the ad.
Five seconds of ad is five seconds too many. And ads in flash video are a huge waste of bandwidth. The addons do not yet exist to block them. If they really want to give us an opt-out, it should available immediately, and it should also be available as a blanket opt-out of all advertisement as a user-configurable setting. Hopefully, if this problem becomes prevalent, work on such video-ad blocking addons will begin in earnest.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
I'd rather have this than a website putting up a paywall to support themselves.
I'd rather click a button to end the ad and tell someone their ad sucked, then pay for a subscription. Especially considering some videos on youtube aren't worth the bits they are stored on.
Besides, this might actually lead to halfway interesting advertisements.
so it's a great idea for everyone involved, advertisers are better able to produce interesting ads, and viewers spend less time viewing ads and especially less on ads that do not interest them at all.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Sounds great! Youtube gets money to run its servers (you don't need to pay for content), advertisers get information on how to make ads that are actually entertaining, and you still get to opt-out. Marketing isn't the problem here as it is at the core of capitalism, it's unavoidable and without it, the market would be monolithic as only monopolist brands would be used. The problem is intrusive marketing. And if they can make enjoyable ads, I'm all for it.
I can't wait to see if the usual "Ads by google..." widget overlaid on the bottom of every youtube video now is also applied to these ads.
"When a TrueView ad unit begins playing, you'll notice a five second countdown timer — as soon as that's up, you'll see an arrow that will let you skip the remainder of the ad and get back to the content you wanted to see, or you can choose to keep on watching the ad."
So at 5 seconds everyone participates in a no-opt-out survey on whether or not the ad interests them. No wonder advertisers like it! They get to sell their products to everyone for 5 seconds at a cut rate, to known-interested parties for X seconds at a normal rate, PLUS info on which ads get the most dropouts, least dropouts, and presumably WHEN they drop out.
I wouldn't mind ads nearly as much if they weren't a constant stream of brain dead insulting lies that assume I'm a moron. If you actually informed me about the product and didn't try to pretend it is the difference between being unhappy and dancing around on a beach with half naked supermodels, I might pay some attention. And while I'm whining, I wish they'd stop filling my mailbox LITERALLY every day with paper catalogs but then nickel and diming me for the cost of a filmsy thin plastic bag because they're "being green". I've actually come to resent ads. I actively avoid buying stuff I've seen advertised on the basis that I'm an idiot. The more ads and less decent programming on Youtube or any other media, the more likely I am just not to bother at all with it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
and you never see any ads on youtube... or anywhere else.
I've never seen a single ads on youtube, what is this about?
a new ad format that lets users skip over ads they aren't interested in
and
you'll notice a five second countdown timer
I have no choice but view the first 5 seconds. At this point I'm already getting an ad I'm not interested in. Just means that I must suffer a 5 second ad instead of a 30 second ad. It's still an ad!
While dumbass spammers may want to shove as much shit as they can at everything, professional advertisers don't. They don't want to piss potential consumers off, they don't want to waste time and money on it, and so on. They want to show you ads that you are interested in. If you don't care about cars because you don't drive, they don't want to show you that since it'll do no good, they get no ROI. However if you do care about videogames, they want to show you ads for those.
Not only does this apply to individuals, but they want to know if ads are effective overall. If everyone wants to skip an ad, they want to get it out of there, no sense in paying for something nobody likes. Also they can tell when an ad has been out for too long, if the number of skips starts increasing and then cycle it out.
Ideally advertisers would love to see inside your brain to know precisely what you are interested in, and what kinds of ads appeal to you, and show you only those. They'd like it if every ad you saw held your attention and interest. That would be the most effective in terms of selling products.
This is a step closer to that, much more effective than just tossing out random ads and seeing what happens.
That is one of the reasons Google ads are so popular. They are context sensitive. If someone searches for "HD camcorder," well guess what? They might just want to buy one so showing them an ad for a place that they can is a good idea. Showing them an ad for garden tools, probably not such a good idea.
MTV.com does this already, but you have to wait 30 seconds, and there is no rhyme or reason to which ones will be skipped. I have skipped one, and then it played another commercial right after it. I call shenanigans on the person that coded that stuff, but I am only showing an example that waiting 5 seconds is not bad if you watch YouTube. For somebody like me who needs to stop watching Nitro Circus, Viva La Bam and Rob and Big, the skip function would be nice if it was like what Youtube is going to implement
The world is how you make it
I'll take this as a breath of fresh air. There are ads when I drive on the road, ads when I watch tv, ads when I read the news, ads when I visit any website, ads on my apps, ads on people's shirts, and in today's material society, many conversations degrade into advertisements about my friends new gadget. One has to wonder whether the companies are really benefiting from what they cram down our throats, or if the marketing people are telling every possible lie to keep themselves making employed (after all who should you trust less about their value than a marketing person?). As real statistics about ad watching come back to the companies, I expect companies will soon face the harsh reality that the only ones "watching" the full add, are the people who go grab some chips while it is playing.
Now if only the online video providers could fix a problem where they try to show you the same ad dozens of times in a row, it may actually become bearable.
I generally won't click a link to an on-line video just for this reason. Even on a "news" site. Rather read it.
Blar.
I'll just wait for the inevitable update to Adblock.
On the other hand, I'd like to have a replay button for some hot ads...
this is a great time for everyone to start using a different video hosting site... youtube is godaweful.
When someone has designed a widget for firefox that blocks these new ads.
I've actually come to resent ads. I actively avoid buying stuff I've seen advertised on the basis that I'm an idiot.
That last sentence...it needs a comma...or rephrasing. Or something.
I'm with you. If the ads had been less intrusive, less annoying and less manipulative earlier in my life I might not mind them so much. But as is I think I've been ruined for life on advertising. Now I have not the slightest compunction about blocking them and avoiding them and screwing the advertisers if at all possible.
What really bothers me is the way they're starting to substitute for culture. In school and now at work people discuss their favorite advertisements as must as their favorite music, books or movies. The advertisements take snippets of dialogue, memes, actions and such and present them in a way that strips them of any relevance or meaning. It's adding noise to the common discourse, and that more than anything else about them pisses me off. The larger the population gets that harder it gets for people to keep up with each other. Advertising just acts as white noise or active misinformation that makes society less functional.
tl;dr: fuck ads
I'd rather have paywalls. The more paywalls the better. Let those who build websites solely to milk websurfers for cash die in obscurity. This whole part of the post '94 web experiment is an informational toxic sludge and needs to go already.
Here's a truism: A woman already knows if she would consider sleeping with a man in the first second of interaction. The poor saps that fail the 1 second test are just wasting their time and money with pick up lines and free drinks.
The same is true for viewers and television advertisers. If your product doesn't convince me in the first second, you're not going to convince me by showing me more. Instead, you're likely to get me to tell my friends to avoid you because you give me the creeps.
You don't think that he's an idiot, and that's why he avoids buying advertised stuff? 'Cause, that's what the sentence appears to say, and it seems plausible.
Marketing isn't the problem here as it is at the core of capitalism, it's unavoidable and without it, the market would be monolithic as only monopolist brands would be used. The problem is intrusive marketing. And if they can make enjoyable ads, I'm all for it.
Yes, marketing is essential for capitalism — but not advertising. Not only is advertising often interruptive (synchronous or highly diverting), often it is manipulative and delivers false information.
High-quality product-related editorial from trusted sources is a better way to find out about the market. There are ways to fund this without either paywalls or advertising (including product placement).
But like you, I applaud Google for this step. Ad-funded TV networks will be in even more trouble as more people hook-up the Net to their TVs and mobile devices.
I'd love to know the stats of how many choose to skip the ads.
For decades I've been exposed to ads which I'm now conditioned to avoid at all costs. I'll be one of those people who won't make the 2 second mark let alone 5.
I just wanted to let you all know, that you are completely free to ignore this post.
You don't have to read it, you don't have to rate it, and I'm perfectly ok with this!
Although for some reason, this brought to my mind the HHGG and the elevator doors.
No wonder advertisers like it! They get to sell their products to everyone for 5 seconds at a cut rate, to known-interested parties for X seconds at a normal rate, PLUS info on which ads get the most dropouts, least dropouts, and presumably WHEN they drop out.
That could be good for the consumer too. If they use the data to target the ads intelligently, some would consider it a feature rather than an annoyance. I'd be happy to watch a 30 second spot that's entertaining/relevant, and Google's probably smart enough to figure that out after categorizing the ones I opt out of.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Youtube has ads?
Odd.. I haven't ever seen an ad on Youtube and rarely see them anywhere else except my TV.
My favorite button on the remote? MUTE...
Sure wish there was AdBlock for TV.
Stops all of those pesky adds - it is awesome.
The people who manage Hulu's advertising must be complete morons.
My favorite example is that they think you're going to sit through a 1:30 block of ads in the middle of your show. If you reload the page, it pops up a 15-30 second ad like you were just starting the video, and takes you right back to where you were. With a little F5 action I cut on average 45 seconds off of each ad break on Hulu. Seriously brain-dead.
The more commercials you force me to watch, the less likely I am to buy any of your shit. This is the case both out of spite, and a subconscious hatred toward the products caused by over-advertising.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
"HI! BILLY MAYS HERE"
Five seconds is way more than needed to annoy people. It should be more like two or three seconds.
When I follow links to videos and it starts with an obnoxious advert, I almost never bother to actually follow through and watch the video that I was originally after -- it's just not worth it to be annoyed that much. I wonder if Youtube will figure that out.
Alternatively, I just mute the volume and go to another tab and come back in two or three minutes after reading/doing something else, so that would also give false information that I had actually watched the whole advert when I really had not.
We're not in soviet russia here. Things are not stored on bits, bits are stored on things.
anything artistically valid is already on Vimeo anyway
As I understand Vimeo's terms of service, it has a strict policy against commercial use. For example, I'd imagine that Vimeo would reject an excerpt from a film of which you are selling copies. It already rejects almost all videos of video games: if you didn't make the game, it's copyright infringement; if you did, it's commercial use to promote the game.
Please don't visit, you're just wasting their bandwidth.
(No, seriously. You have nothing to offer YouTube, so they'd probably prefer to skip you.)
Cue the Soviet Russia jokes, as if it wasn't already predictable.
I already skip ALL Youtube ads with Adblock.
I hate the extortion tacticts "if you want this, you have to see that". But I also hate double standards: when I declare I want to make the sacrifice, companies deny me access to content: Dear Internet, please please pretty please give me back my AOL radio. For so many years I was enjoying your music channels and although in Europe, I was listening to your ads with religious dedication.
In addition, if you really want to see that 1981 ad that reminds you your childhood, you have to *pay* for membership to special collector's sites.
Our attention span, eyeballs and clicks (I am gratefully eternal to /. because I heard here for the first time the term "attention economy") have become the new currency, more stable than the USD, more precious than gold.
The next step surely must be ads embedded in linux isos, freeware and shareware (maybe in security patches too?) - it's gonna be called Embedded Adware (remember you heard it here first).
Since when?
I really hate it when I want to watch a specific clip on YouTube and be forced to watch an ad first. The other day the ad played after I had watched the clip and I actually watched the advertisement, for the first time ever.
I understand that it is expensive to run an online service such as YouTube so I don't have a problem with ads as long as they don't get in the way.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Advertisers have a long ways to go before even beginning to make up for all the tampon commercials I've been made to watch. Even as a non-adult male (wtf does a 6 year old boy really need tampon ads with his morning ninja turtles?)
If I have to watch an ad before a video I just click back. I really don't have time to spend wasting it on some advert that can't be skipped. Someone posted above they might as well use a paywall, the end result is the same - I dont see the content and the provider get no money from me. There's always alternative sources. As for tv ads. I don't watch them either. I get all my tv downloaded with ads removed. Even ads on a commercial radio station when driving I change station.
I won't click it. I'll do what I've always done; Queue the video, mute it, come back in 5 minutes start the clip from the beginning. I spend zero time watching the advertisements.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I flatly refuse to use SeeSaw.com now, because of the obnoxious forced ads, and their buggy (due to DRM) implementation. Often, their video will bug out, you have to restart the whole thing - and sit through the same Windows 7 commercial I have already seen five times. I already own Win7, so the adverts just makes me angrier each time I see them.
You don't think that he's an idiot, and that's why he avoids buying advertised stuff? 'Cause, that's what the sentence appears to say, and it seems plausible.
Granted it's ambiguous. The audience I care about can parse it to understand what I meant. Trolls, idiots and jokers I don't care so much about. Everyone's free to have a laugh.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you choose not to watch ads, then YouTube is paying money (via bandwidth, maintenance, etc.) to deliver you content, and you are giving them nothing back in return. In effect, you are freeloading. This is fine - free market and whatnot - but at least understand that your behaviors are only possible because they're subsidized by other more-profitable viewers. You're the Internet's equivalent of a welfare family. I agree with you in some ways - there should be no right to make money. However, it goes both ways. They have no right to make money, and you have no right to use their service. Unless you're willing to participate in some form of quid pro quo arrangement with a service provider, don't be surprised if you find yourself excluded from their service in favor of profitable users. With free services, meeting them halfway is the name of the game.
There are too many technical problems with your argument. Just because my browser or their Flash applet downloads an ad doesn't even mean that I see it. Just because the ad shows up on my screen doesn't mean that I have paid attention to it. Just because I pay attention to an ad doesn't mean I will visit the advertiser's web site, nor does it mean that I will purchase from them.
To follow your logic, if advertisers support the service, then I should go buy from them, otherwise I'm freeloading by not giving them anything in return.
All advertising is subject to this fundamental problem, whether print ads, billboards, radio, TV, web, streaming web video, or even a guy standing on the street corner in a costume waving a sign: there is no guarantee to the advertiser that anyone will notice or pay attention to his ads; there is no guarantee of return on his investment.
And to that problem I say: tough cheese. I'm not obligated to watch or listen to or think about anyone's ads. I can look away from billboards, skip print ads, turn down radio ads, change channels (or walk away from) TV ads, and as it so happens, can use technical measures to avoid Internet ads. And the advertisers are free to try to use technical countermeasures--oh well, arms races can be fun. No money has changed hands between us, so neither of us is obligated to do anything.
Of course they would love to find ways to force us to see and think about ads (i.e. to brainwash us), but I'm under no obligation to let them. If they don't want people "freeloading" by skipping ads, then they should go Hulu's route, or require registration, or sell access--and if those measures drive away visitors such as myself, so be it. I can live without YouTube--the world got along fine without it for a few thousand years, and the Internet's full of alternatives.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Just hit the refresh button and more often than not, you get the video without the ad.
I guess its finally time to take the flash-plugin off my machine.
Advertisers will now be forced to advertise effectively in five seconds. Or lose out.
YouTube is working on profit maximization (and thus minimization of annoyance) by showing you only the things you are probably interested in. To rank ads in order or relevance for a particular user, they collect information on view, click through and abandonment. This data is part of a set that includes information about the video being watched, the users who have watched it, etc. This allows them to figure out (theoretically) which ads you are likely to be interested in given a particular video by applying machine learning algorithms. This way YouTube and its advertisers get the most out of their money and your time.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/product-awareness-increased-with-advertisement,307/
"Sir! We have the new data in! It shows that everyone hates the guts of all advertising ever!"