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YouTube To Roll Out 6-Second Ads That You Can't Skip (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: YouTube announced on Tuesday that it will be introducing an unskippable, 6-second bumper ads before certain videos. The video juggernaut says that these ads are largely aimed at mobile users. "We like to think of Bumper ads as little haikus of video ads -- and we're excited to see what the creative community will do with them," YouTube's Zach Lupei wrote in a blog post. The Verge reports, "The company justifies the short ads (which cannot be skipped, unlike longer spots) by pointing to research showing that 50 percent of 18 to 49-year-olds turn to mobile as their first option for consuming video -- and keep in mind a ton of that is music."

19 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Well yes duh by suso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How else did you think they were going to pay for all that bandwidth you consume watching 15 minute 4K videos of someone unboxing toys?

    1. Re:Well yes duh by mythosaz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Peering doesn't pay for hard drives and racks.

      I mean, selling your user data probably does, but....

    2. Re:Well yes duh by inode_buddha · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why should their business model (or lack thereof) be my problem?

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      C|N>K
    3. Re:Well yes duh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because if their business model isn't sustanable they do crap like this to fix that?

    4. Re:Well yes duh by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not. No-one's forcing you go to YouTube.

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      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    5. Re:Well yes duh by inode_buddha · · Score: 2, Insightful

      *sigh* OK then I quit youtube altogether. Now how much are those advertising eyeballs worth? . In fact I *do* have a problem with it. Its not like these are poor little startups without any cash. I'll just send them a bill for the bandwidth maybe. And as far as the content creators go, none of the "how-to" community that I'm in, depends on ad revenue.

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      C|N>K
  2. Haikus of video ads? by olsmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've got a Haiku for you.

    greedy company
    intrusive advertisements
    I'll watch somewhere else

  3. If you don't want me to watch it... by vanyel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...go ahead and put ads in it. If the first thing I see is an ad, or one pops up, my immediate next click is on the window close button. I'm there for the content, and if you disrupt that, you're history as there's no point otherwise.

  4. Re:Caps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Youtube is already bandwidth hogging. Don't use the service if you're unwilling to pay for it.

  5. Do we need to post Ars and Verge stories? by halivar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I go to Slashdot for first-source news; the same reason I go to Ars Technica and the Verge. The problem with linking stories on other news aggregation sites is you've increased the chances that I've already seen the story (and perhaps already commented on it) to just about 90%. Let's link the original source and skip the middle man (i.e. the competition).

  6. Re:"cannot be skipped" by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We are inexorably marching towards Blipverts.

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    #DeleteChrome
  7. The cycle continues... by CAIMLAS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This same cycle has happened with many a lowly tech company; it's a fine line that google has been treading, but it's bound to happen with some of their services:

    Step 1: Create a product which has massive social appeal, operate in the red and make up for it in volume
    Step 2: IPO
    Step 3: Get massive speculative investment
    Step 4: Never turn a profit off your actual vehicle, merely use it as an avenue for...
    Step 5: Ad impression generation
    Step 6: Slow exodus of viewers
    Step 7: Increase ads to make up for exodus
    Step 8: Competitors step in to fill vacuum
    Step 9: Viable competitor presents itself, starts consuming market share
    Step 10: Eventual collapse of initial product, go to Step 1 for new competitor's product.

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    ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  8. So you advocate the opposite of net neutrality? by raymorris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > If YouTube wants money they can get it from the ISPs.

    So under your proposal, YouTube would charge ISPs for access to their site. As would Slashdot and all of the other free (advertising-supported) sites, I suppose. If your ISP doesn't pay up, you can;t access YouTube, correct?

    So you only get access to those sites that your ISP pays for. Obviously your ISP isn't going to jack around making contracts for $10/year to access HowToFixAppliances.com, or any of the other 99.99% of web sites that aren't in the top 500 most popular. So you get access to whichever portion of the Alexa top 500 that your ISP negotiates a satisfactory deal with, and nothing else.

    I don't care for that plan. What I prefer is that I buy access to the INTERNET as a whole, Slashdot, YouTube, and VeggieRecipes.com get access to the internet, and I can access any site. Time Warner and Comcast aren't involved with paying the bills for third-party web sites, and don't control what I can access.

  9. Re:"cannot be skipped" by Rob+Y. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since they're already making you watch the first 6 seconds before the 'skip' button appears, it's more like they're accepting the fact that everyone hits the skip button at the first opportunity. At least this makes the advertisers attempt to be clever within the 6 second limit, and maybe could make for an interesting twitter-like ad experience. But if, once the skip button is gone, they start letting the ad length creep upward, that'll be the beginning of the end.

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    Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
  10. Re:Caps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, jackass, it's not free. Someone has to pay for it. Either you're the customer and you pay for it with cash, or you're the product and the advertisers pay the cash. Fuckoff with your "I deserve" bullshit.

  11. "largely aimed at mobile users" by wardrich86 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "largely aimed at mobile users"

    Yes thanks, because I have so much fucking mobile data to begin with, and it's soooooooo cheap.

    fucking asswipes. Glad my phone's out of warranty soon so I can root it and install AdAway again.

  12. Re:"cannot be skipped" by c · · Score: 3, Insightful

    it's more like they're accepting the fact that everyone hits the skip button at the first opportunity.

    People might be a lot less inclined to hit 'skip' right away if they cracked down on the loudness of ads. I'm finding with a lot of them (video game ads primarily) that I'm ignoring the ad content entirely because I'm hunting for the volume control, then immediately going for the skip button. Youtube audio levels are already variable enough without allowing the television loudness tricks to take hold, too.

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    Log in or piss off.
  13. AKA YouTube to forcibly market Youtube Red by maugle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Hey, there's still not enough people signing up for YouTube Red"
    "OK, hit the button marked 'Make Regular YouTube Slightly Shittier' once or twice"

  14. Criminal enterprise needs more money by shanen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, that thing with bumping the volume on the ads is especially annoying and especially abused by a couple of scam companies that use loud sirens or screeches to insure they have my attention. And hatred.

    What I can't understand is the financial model driving their insane rudeness. I am not aware of ANY ad on YouTube that represented ANY product or service that I would ever consider buying--and if I did remember their ad, it would insure I would try much harder NOT to buy it even if I thought I had a use for it. Whatever it is.

    There must be some aliens among us who respond to the ads?

    Anyway, the real problem is that YouTube itself is a criminal enterprise. Every week for the last few years I do an obvious search to see scam results. There are two to five legitimate results buried in several pages of scam results. How is it benefiting YouTube or the google to assist the scammers in pwning YOUR computer? I still can't figure it, but it obviously isn't going away any time soon. (There are several obvious countermeasures, but YouTube only took one baby step in the last few years.)

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    Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.