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YouTube Will 'Frustrate' Some Users With Ads So They Pay for Music (bloomberg.com)
YouTube will increase the number of ads that some users see between music videos, part of a strategy to convince more of its billion-plus viewers to pay for a forthcoming subscription music service from the Google-owned video site. Bloomberg: People who treat YouTube like a music service, those passively listening for long periods of time, will encounter more ads, according to Lyor Cohen, the company's global head of music. "You're not going to be happy after you are jamming 'Stairway to Heaven' and you get an ad right after that," Cohen said in an interview at the South by Southwest music festival. Cohen is trying to prove that YouTube is committed to making people pay for music and silence the "noise" about his company's purported harm to the recording industry. The labels companies have long criticized YouTube for hosting videos that violate copyrights, and not paying artists and record companies enough.
adblockers will become more adept at blocking Youtube ads not just in this context, but in every context.
if DRM has taught us anything its that aggravating someone is the worst way to get them to participate in a market. Give me a link to the artist and I'd likely be far more interested in donating cash for certain songs in a live stream.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Advertising on YouTube is a really terrible idea. I hope they never decide to put ads on it. That would ruin the site.
Alternatively: YouTube to frustrate users to use a different source for their music.
I download all youtube unless I am just wandering around on youtube checking out new stuff. I download about 20 things a day from youtube, typically to mp3 formate as I don't care about the video aspect. I do it all with a free downloader online. It works great and I can load them up on my phone and listen all day without one commercial.
Listening to MUSIC (sound) on a site dedicated to VIDEO (light).
This continues to boggle me that people do this.
Don't they know that the sound quality is a lot worse.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
I don't see anywhere in the summary or the article (such as it is) about them being "audible" ads, just that ads will become more frequent.
I'd say that parent post was correct, adblock and carry on.
Why YouTube gets a free pass on copyright infringement? How much you want to bet if I hosted a bunch of copyrighted music videos other users uploaded on my site which i then monetized by ads i would be in jail right now? Let's call this service "The Pirate Tube".
I've never understood this strategy, exactly. I mean, I know why Google/YouTube is doing it, but what's in it for the advertisers?
Flooding the system with ads that are specifically meant to drive people to ad-free subscriptions means you're removing all the people that have the money to pay for stuff AND who can't tolerate ignoring ads. What you're left with is either people that don't have the money, or are so good at ignoring ads they don't care.
(I know that ads work on a semi-conscious level; even someone that really claims not to be affected can't help but be to some extent. Still, I don't see it as a good value for advertisers.)
Will this tactic backfire? If people want to start paying for music, why does youtube think that youtube will be the vendor for those people?
You advertise something for free or low cost to get (in their case) eyeballs or the ability to legally say it costs some lowball price.
You really want to sell the upgraded version, but you can't take away the original offer without pissing off your customers and sometimes the FTC (bait and switch).
If your customers aren't going for the upsell, you just degrade the lowball product until they do.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
If you had understood the summary and anything at all about advertising and blocking then you wouldn't have made such a stupidly ridiculous post.
the money is actually going to the artists or is RIAA going to skim off it's 99%?
Didn't you learn anything from webpages and what happened to their ad revenues when ads became more and more obnoxious? What did people do? Grin and bear it? Pay for the pages? Or install more and more sophisticated blockers for the nuisance?
The only thing that will happen is that people install adblockers. Worse, you'll get people who did NOT use adblockers so far to use them. The ones that are your key audience. The ones that don't want to deal with "that computer shit" and just want their fix. The ones that still put up with your ads. You have already lost the ones that do care and that do know how to use adblockers. I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in ages.
You are about to learn what the webpage ad industry learned: That you can actually make mountains move if you pester them enough. These are the people who put up with 20+ popups from some "free" software they installed. These are the people that dutifully close window after window every time they start their computer because they have no idea how to clean their autorun from uninstalled software that didn't quite uninstall properly. These are the people that surf on 5" browser windows on 30" screens because the rest of the browser real estate is hogged by "browser bars" they somehow installed and now don't know how to get rid of.
The ad industry managed to piss THESE people off enough that they installed ad blockers!
And now they are whining and begging and threatening and complaining that their ad revenue dried up. And they beg and plead to deactivate and uninstall those adblockers. But there is no going back. These people will continue to block. Worse, it's likely they don't even know how to deactivate it, even if they could be bothered to do it.
YouTube, you're about to learn the same lesson. Why do you insist in touching the stove yourself, ain't it enough that everyone else is already crying over scorched hands?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My guess is they're trying the market segment that cannot google "Youtube ad blocker".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The ad industry is used to paying for the privilege to piss people off, there's nothing new here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As a person with some music up on youtube - yes. You have to upload as HD video, otherwise it goes to...err...96kbps? Something like that. Uploading as HD video gets you 192kbps audio, so even though it's literally just a static picture of the album cover all my stuff is uploaded as HD.
Since the adpocolypse, I block all ads on youtube. Any channel that I care about already got demonitized, so I pay them directly with Patreon or buying shit from them.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I think that is the plan. Youtube wants you to only view a small subset of corporate advertiser friendly channels.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Wow, I play my collection of music I bought on CDs and ripped to MP3 in all sorts of ways, and I never hear ads.
How tragic that when you stream your music from an ad platform that you get ... ads!
That is mystifying.
Sorry, no, I'm not subscribing to music. Not from Apple, not from Google, and definitely not from the music industry.
I still buy CDs and support the artists, but once that transaction is done, it's nobody's business when, where, how, and how often I listen to it.
When that option goes away, I'll stick with my huge collection of music and stop giving a damn.
It's kind of hard to see how Google is fighting the perception that people are using it as a free music service and the content people aren't getting paid, when people are using it as a free music service and the content people aren't getting paid.
Either the content is perfectly legal, in which case what's the issue? Or the content is infringing, in which case, why don't they take it down?
Whatever, don't use YouTube, don't care.
The places I have seen them use it as a video service where pubs and they have adblock enabled in one way or another.
The moments I use it as a music service, I will find a 10 hour video. The reason I look for a long music video is because I have autoplay disabled and do not want to enable it just for the one time and then forget it and have it enabled when I open my 20 tabs of things I want to see.
I would think that a better solution would be to have less ads. That would encourage more people to use it and the result is more income. Otherwise they will look for alternative that is free with less ads. Online radio is a great alternative.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
They're starting to get too heavy handed. For a site that started due to Nipplegate I find it amusing. But then Google owns it so there's that.
I have a Google Music subscription, so I get Youtube Red (no commercials) for free.
The family plan is affordable and comparable to other services. And my son isn't bombarded with commercials on youtube. Win win.
"please could you stop the noise im tryin a get some REST? from all the unbornchikkenVoicesin my head?"
I see ads before almost every video, no matter how long it is. A few times I got ads much longer than the video itself. And I'm not even watching music videos. For music I already have Amazon Music and I don't care much about the videos.
Are you saying they'll frustrate me even more than this? Some of the ads I even watch once - if I'm interested, and they still flood me as much as they do my friend who snipes the skip button.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
It is actually possible for You Tube to get more paying subscribers and still not manage to pay artists or the RIAA any more, although I'll guess that maybe the RIAA will end up with slightly more money in that scenario. See Spotify, etc.
"Cohen is trying to prove that YouTube is committed to making people pay for music and silence the "noise" about his company's purported harm to the recording industry..."
Oh, so you wish to silence the purported noise by forcing customers to pay by annoying the shit out of them? Thanks for clarifying what 21st Century customer service has become for those Too Big To Fail. A Fuck You Very Much And Have A Nice Day mantra from you friendly owns-the-neighborhood mega-corp. I've said it before. Corporate Arrogance is not a good thing, but there's never enough people that give a shit enough to stop it, so it will continue to spread like a disease.
"...The labels companies have long criticized YouTube for hosting videos that violate copyrights, and not paying artists and record companies enough."
Oh, so THAT is the reason you're doing this? You care about the artists? Well, I'll be waiting for your financial statements that show that 100% of the revenue generated from this WILL be supporting that justification then. Needless to say, I'm not holding my breath.
(1) "mute" button
(2) rip the music off the video for future use, saved locally.
Problem solved without paying Gootube a dime.
How on earth did artists ever survive back in the days when you just paid them once for a record/tape/CD that you could play over and over for the next 20 years without paying them again? Especially when the studio/distributor/retailers took the lion's share of that money?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
..until morale improves.
Signed,
YouTube Management
"The labels companies have long criticized YouTube for hosting videos that violate copyrights, and not paying artists and record companies enough"
Just because that was, like, their entire business model.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Or the more likely scenario.. people will stop using youtube for passive music listening.
I myself never relied on youtube for such things because there were already enough ads to make the experience more than a little irritating. So now they're going to add MORE ads?
They really didn't think this through, did they?
...because customers just love giving money to companies who annoy them!
I take "If you annoy me, fuck you!" to the extreme: if I see an annoying floating/autoplay/background ad for a movie or video game I make a conscious decision to avoid it. 99% of the time, it's something I was already aware of, and WOULD HAVE PAY TO PLAY/SEE if not for their choice to stick it in my face.
Unfortunately, there's no box i can tick to tell them this - they just wonder why their revenues are down, and double-down on their bullshit advertising campaigns.
Audible ads wouldn't be so bad, and I could even see how they might be fair enough considering I'm getting to listen to music for free - but if there's one thing that pisses me off about them, its that the volume level is substantially louder than the music you are listening to.
This is what really pisses me off about ads more than anything else - same for TV ads too.
I shouldn't have to reach for the remote control to turn down the fucking volume for fear of going deaf every time an add break comes on.
With a standard ad-blocker (others are mentioning adblock plus, but I prefer ublock) you can block all ads on Youtube, unless they're actually part of the video.
No ads before videos, no ads afterwards, no audio ads, no video ads, no banners. None.
You know there are adblockers that just remove the youtube ads completely right?
If the ad market tanks, hopefully it will kill facebook and neuter google. Is that naive? It sounds naive.. but hope springs eternal.
Dear god, please let that happen.
Recorded music is almost a commodity now. Trying to harvest it for the profit/revenue levels of yesteryear will fail.
The first reason is the most obvious: the Internet makes it easier to pirate music.
The second is there's more choice available now, thanks to the Web. If you make Option A too expensive, consumers will go with Option B, all the way down the alphabet (company name pun half intended).
The third is that many make free music for the sheer fun of it and it's easy to put online. Career musicians have to compete with free music. Granted, most amateurs suck and people generally prefer professional artists. But if the professional music gets too expensive, people will turn to amateurs. (More specifically, there is personally enjoyable amateur stuff, it just takes a lot of sifting to find it.) Many amateurs also give some of the their music away in an attempt to break into the business. The ratio of people who want to be a star versus actual stars is very large.
Concerts, events, and weddings are where the professionals will get most of their revenue, not sales of recordings.
Table-ized A.I.
... the plan is to increase the ad revenue.
My wife was listening to a playlist on Saturday and there was an ad for YouTube Red in the middle of one of the songs. I don't have a problem with YouTube supporting themselves with ad revenue, but to interrupt a song seems a step too far. It's as bad as the videos you see now on Facebook that are a minute long, but have a 30 second commercial inserted in the middle.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Youtube has ads? I must be really lucky.. I never see any ads. lol
YouTube Will 'Frustrate' Some Users With Ads So They use adblockers
There, fixed.
The problem I have is all the services want total control, I've flat out had songs removed from my playlist from an artist as they take them off the service, like google play, then have to go find the song on youtube.
I almost forgot the name of the song and would have never known except one of my devices hadn't updated yet and had it removed.
If there was more responsibility and accountability to provide proper access or notification if a song has been removed from the service it would be better.
In the end, I pay about 10$ a month to listen to music every now and then, but if it keeps up bands are going to find it harder to get discovered, and I'll switch to buying music I like, taking it on medium I control, and that'll be the end of it.
I'm okay with people being paid for their work, but I'm not okay with people dictating when they'll take it away from me, after taking my money.
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Half their ads don't work right at all, either not loading or requiring a Windows box to display properly. The skip button on skippable ads is hit-or-miss if you're not running a bleeding-edge browser or have Noscript installed. Amateurish shit like that is the opposite of what would make me want to give them money.
They already interleave pretty nearly every video with an ad, meaning that (assuming 5min videos) per hour you're seeing about the same number of commercials (12) as broadcast tv... ...I wonder how THAT'S going to work out for them?
-Styopa
The music-to-ad content became low enough that people started going elsewhere for music. YouTube will learn that this can happen to them as well.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Are you saying that people never listen to music written before they were born? Seriously? I listen to classical music all the time, and I am pretty sure I'm not THAT old. My guess is that everybody who has heard a Beethoven symphony in the last few years was not alive when it was written.
"Stairway to Heaven" came out the year I graduated from high school. It's still better than a lot of the crap out there now.
Fuck monetization.
Here's to peace in Korea and a crash in the ad market. Cheers!
I wouldn't mind paying --- if the extra money went to the artists. Right now, it doesn't. They don't pay musicians / songwriter effin squat. And they are proud of it. They want to run more ads- then pay the artists another 10 cents per play.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
The way I see it is that unfortunately at some point as annoying as it may be, YouTube needs to find a way to make money or at least break even on it's services. Nobody's keen on paying for a "free" service so stuck with ADs is how it's done. I know a lot of folks say that they're just going to hop to another "free" service but let's face it, you can't run a large global server service for free.
Here in Belgium, in the heart of the EU, it's only frustration. The more you look at YouTube, the more ads get stuffed into your content. But 'Youtube Red is not available in your area'. So we can't even pay. Added to that, the legislation in our country explicitly bans and regulates ads towards children. Effectively making these actions by Google not only frustrating but ILLEGAL!
One thing I haven't seen mentioned, even though LOTS of other intelligent comments were made on why this is a bad idea?
A lot of people who are regular listeners to music via YouTube don't even care about the video content. They're strictly using it to stream the songs they want to hear. This would often be your pre-teens and teens who don't have money to pay for a music subscription but want to hear their favorite new music releases. If YouTube wanted them to consume less bandwidth, they could offer an option to simply listen to the tracks with the video disabled -- and I think many of the users would be just fine with that.
So Youtube will take their main revenue stream and intentionally misuse it to try to convince their main target audience that they'd like to join the company's other revenue stream? This is bad business for so many reason...
Advertisers should be ticked that their ads are being used not to convince people to buy their products, but to drive people away from the advertising model as a whole, and this is being done intentionally.
Content creators shouldn't be too happy about this either, as the intended result also lowers their potential revenue base.
Users obviously won't like this for obvious reasons, and many will never pay for Youtube services. If they become frustrated enough they'll simply turn to alternatives. Anyone remember Pandora?
Admitting that you're going to try to make users mad is a bad look, and this doesn't seem like a sustainable way to structure a business, given that advertising is the main revenue stream. Adblockers will continue to get better, especially if the impetus grows stronger.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
In Soviet America, entertainment watches you!