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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."

29 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. I'm not interested in any of them by Rix · · Score: 4, Informative

    Please don't show them to me, you're just wasting my time and your bandwidth.

    1. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But then how will these marketers be able to try to convince you to buy a bunch of shit you don't really need?

    2. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by Jeeeb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, with providers only giving you a limited amount of bandwidth, they are wasting your bandwidth.

      The solution to that would be to not use their free online video service. Maybe try a different one in protest?

    3. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by icebike · · Score: 3, Funny

      If a the ads with then youtube video max out your bandwidth, maybe you should take a close look at your network.

      I'll get right on that, as soon as I untangle that sentence. Ouch!

      --
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    4. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by jcoy42 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm sure adblock plus will continue to function as advertised.

      Seriously, is anyone using /. still seeing ads? It's a non-issue.

      --
      Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
    5. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by DarkOx · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The trick with advertising in general is to make an impression. Any impression is better than no impression because people will generally when face with a decision go with the familiar over an unknown even when the familiar is an irritant. There is a line you can cross thought where people form a strong negative impression.

      Making an impression is getting progressively harder because of all the noise, and lack of novelty. It used to be you could throw up some bill boards with catchy slogans in pretty plain print and get the job done, not so today. We have seen it all and someone is trying to do something louder and flashier right next to you. Ideally you'd make a positive impression but that is hard when you are turning to the proverbial blink tag to get noticed at all, most advertizers are happy just getting noticed today.

      Using technology to force people to view an add is crossing that bright line for lots of people where its not just irritating its infuriating at least if you do to much of it. Google might have really hit the nail upon the head here. If you are not interested in an ad you don't get a sour grapes impression of the product going forward by being force to watch. If you are interested you can watch it and in anycase you are being asked to decide if its interesting in order to dismiss it so you are at least recognizing what the product is and associating an name with it. Those are all huge wins in advertisers books.

      This is pretty much applied media studies 101, which is about the limits of my knowledge on the subject but the whole thing makes allot of sense, so much sense I am glad someone is brave enough to try it.

      --
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    6. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by duguk · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Please don't show them to me, you're just wasting my time and your bandwidth.

      You have got to be kidding me.

      You expect to be able to watch it for free
      You don't want to watch adverts to fund it
      And you don't want to pay for it

      What other methods of income for Youtube and free TV do you suggest for them to survive?

    7. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by epine · · Score: 2

      If I see one more "Skip this Welcome Page" I'm going to scream. I close them arbitrarily. If they have sound I never go back to that site.

      Cover shock is nothing new. I used to feel the same way about nightclubs guarded by self-important muffin men. On the other side of the door, a wall of noise and twenty varieties of macro brew.

      Google is weak in setting up a personal filter for places you never wish to visit. They are migrating traditional saturation-bomb advertisers to targeted marketing very slowly, one sip at a time.

      The other factor to bear in mind is that people are unreliable in assessing their immunity to the slime factor (ads you didn't wish to suffer through, that affect your future purchasing regardless).

      I'd like to be able to point my phone at any product in a supermarket and have the phone play the most obnoxious advertisement run on TV for the product instantly, so I can boycott on gag factor. There's hardly any direct punishment for advertisers who wag their junk in your face.

      Google is trying to balance here on the cusp of interruption marketing and permission marketing, in the terminology of Seth Godin. The first five seconds of these ad clips will end up being a lot like movie trailers. For your standard action movie, a trailer often contains 100% of the content worth viewing reduced to half second snippets. Why anyone shows up at these movies after seeing the trailer is beyond me.

      Godin somehow believes that products can be so exceptional, that permission isn't an automatic precursor to disappointment. Definitely, these products exist. And mostly they sell themselves. He calls them purple cows.

      Maybe the one area where advertising makes sense is hawking overpriced accessories for a killer product to tap impulse buying during the love affair. What we all need to fill our hollow days is the toy that keeps on spending. I've had a few. Good times, kinda.

      Wake me up when advertising figures out how to tap into a value system of self restraint. I mean the actual value system, and not just the T shirt.

      Speaking of purple cows, one has to love Open Pandora.

      Open Pandora - Hands on.

      Tucker had nothing on those guys. But have no fear, as of two days ago, the nubs are golden!

    8. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by Dodgy+G33za · · Score: 2

      And being forced to sit through even 5 seconds of an ad will stop ME from using the services of YouTube, and probably plenty of others.

    9. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by icebraining · · Score: 2

      If that happens, they'll reverse the decision. It's not like they don't measure page views.

      I don't have any numbers, but I'm pretty confident page the drop in page views won't be statistically relevant.

    10. Re:I'm not interested in any of them by Rix · · Score: 2

      Of course. Why wouldn't I want those things?

      However, I didn't say they shouldn't show ads, just that I, personally, am not interested in any of them. Some people are more receptive to advertising than others, and I'm pretty far into the low end of that scale.

      Slashdot doesn't seem to have a problem with me opting out of their ads...

  2. Why five seconds? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:Why five seconds? by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

      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.

      Which is why Coca Cola has been so successful. They realized that they only needed to show someone their ads once and would hook them for life. No.. wait, that's not right..

  3. Re:What? by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Only when browsing porn. Thats the only time I've found pop ups convenient.

  4. Not watching the ad almost as valuable as watching by The+Archon+V2.0 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "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.

  5. Re:Why not just make 5-second ads? by CaptainPatent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, your initial suggestion has a valid point buried within it. I think the 5 second adds are what companies should be aiming for in the current market

    I don't think companies seeking or publishing advertising realize how diluted the ad experience gets when there's so many ads with so much content to each.

    For example, the current TV ad saturation is 22 minutes of program to 8 minutes of ads for a 30 minute slot or over 25% of the total time. For some online videos it's even worse - for example I've been subjected to a 30 second commercial in return for viewing a 45 second clip (thanks to CNN.com.) With that type of trade-off, instead of the viewing experience being enjoyable, the onslaught of ads begin to make the viewing experience a chore and overall the ads become less memorable.

    I actually applaud Youtube for this implementation because 5 seconds is enough to get a rudimentary message across. If that message annoys the viewer it can easily be skipped over so companies that don't advertise with fresh or entertaining content and are viewed as an annoyance can be skipped easily. Good trade-off for everyone.

    --
    Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
  6. Re:What? by DragonWriter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are ads users want to see?

    Yes, there are a some ads (which ones vary from user to user) which promote products or services that a user was not previously aware of and in which the user is interested and which are, in fact, ads the user wants to see.

    Heck, people voluntarily choose to watch infomercials, which are really long ads that aren't even attached to other content.

  7. Re:What? by Qzukk · · Score: 2

    Yes, there are a some ads (which ones vary from user to user) which promote products or services that a user was not previously aware of and in which the user is interested and which are, in fact, ads the user wants to see.

    Not only that, but sometimes ads are pretty cool.

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  8. Re:You can't skip. by Rary · · Score: 2

    So... in the event that the advertisement is less than five seconds in length, you can't skip them.

    Having unskippable < 5 sec ads is a significant improvement over having unskippable 30+ sec ads.

    --

    "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

  9. Re:Why not just make 5-second ads? by Stregano · · Score: 2

    Pretty much every major website will do this to you (IGN, MTV, CNN, Hulu). I hates ads with a passion. The worst is one time I wanted to catch an episode of Viva La Bam on MTV.com (say what you want, the episode was funny), and I seriously had to watch the same Latisse eyelash commercial 4 times in a row and the commericial lasts about 45 seconds. After that, it went to another commercial and gave me the option to skip it. Or when I go to Cinnemasacre, I have to watch that stupid commercial before every single video for Mobile PC or whatever it is called. I think in order to attract people that frequent sites, if they switched commercials more instead of showing the same one over and over, I could possibly have interest, but when you force me to sit there and watch the same commercial 4 times in a row, or the same one at the beginning of every video, I just get annoyed.

    --
    The world is how you make it
  10. Re:Not watching the ad almost as valuable as watch by meza · · Score: 2

    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.

  11. Re:Not watching the ad almost as valuable as watch by AarghVark · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Re:Targeting advertising by geekoid · · Score: 2

    The target market to see IE9 ads is whomever MS determines is the target market. If it's something you don't have, wouldn't that make you the ideal candidate to advertise the product to?
    You could have bootcamp, you could do virtualization, and so on.

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  13. fix endless repeats too by kharchenko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:Should be a setting to avoid them entirely by santax · · Score: 2

    Just write down the name of the product advertised and put it on your black-shopping-list. The only thing that will stop adds is the effect of adds. As soon as *BUY ME* will stand for won't buy you... the adds will be gone. As long as they work they will stay.

  15. Re:Not watching the ad almost as valuable as watch by martin-boundary · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  16. Hulu is the WORST by MacGyver2210 · · Score: 2

    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
  17. Re:So we're forced to watch them for 5 seconds? by tepples · · Score: 2

    How is this "letting users" skip ads, compared to the existing Youtube popups we can close instantly?

    TrueView is not an alternative to the pop-ups. It's an alternative to the 15- or 30-second video ads before some partner videos.

  18. Re:What? by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 3, Funny

    You do realise that:

    -She's not actually waiting for you
    - She's not in your area
    - You're going to need a credit card to find these things out.

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