Youtube and others want their users to disable adblockers to increase their revenue from advertisements, but will forcing the users to so do be effective in ...
I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.
Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?
Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.
Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.
Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.
Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.
When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.
On frequency, very little. They can demonetize a video, but that also pulls it out of the recommendation algorithm, so they will only be shown on the subscription tabs of people subscribed to you. No new eyes. I think you used to be able to pick how many mid rolls, but they then changed it to either mid-rolls on or off. Monetization forces a pre-video ad. No say on the number of ads for either. So YouTube can insert as many as they think they can get away with. There’s also stories of people who had their videos demonetized for no reason, or people who had mid-rolls off and YT decided to show them anyways, and people who had monetization off but YT decided to show ads and monetize the video, because they can do anything they want and there’s literally nothing anyone can do to influence them other than whine and threaten to leave the site.
As for the content, almost zero. It’s all an automated bidding algorithm. Ad buyers place bets on how much money they want to spend per month/week/day on their ads, and choose a set of tags of the kind of people they want the ad to be shown to. Then the creators can vet some tags for kinds of ads, it’s a black-list white-list system. But anything not explicitly forbidden by the channel owner is game. They’re also super nebulous and unhelpful labels, you can’t even remotely predict which ads will be shown before your channels. When it’s time to show an ad, the algorithm brings in all the factors together and runs a bidding to determine which ad will be shown and automatically charges ad costs and revenue share.
The cherry on top, you can buy other people’s videos as ads. As in you can pay to YT, to show either your own or someone’s else videos before other people videos. Whole 10+ minute videos! if you wanted to.
Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.
I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.
Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?
Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.
Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.
Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.
Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.
When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.
On frequency, very little. They can demonetize a video, but that also pulls it out of the recommendation algorithm, so they will only be shown on the subscription tabs of people subscribed to you. No new eyes. I think you used to be able to pick how many mid rolls, but they then changed it to either mid-rolls on or off. Monetization forces a pre-video ad. No say on the number of ads for either. So YouTube can insert as many as they think they can get away with. There’s also stories of people who had their videos demonetized for no reason, or people who had mid-rolls off and YT decided to show them anyways, and people who had monetization off but YT decided to show ads and monetize the video, because they can do anything they want and there’s literally nothing anyone can do to influence them other than whine and threaten to leave the site.
As for the content, almost zero. It’s all an automated bidding algorithm. Ad buyers place bets on how much money they want to spend per month/week/day on their ads, and choose a set of tags of the kind of people they want the ad to be shown to. Then the creators can vet some tags for kinds of ads, it’s a black-list white-list system. But anything not explicitly forbidden by the channel owner is game. They’re also super nebulous and unhelpful labels, you can’t even remotely predict which ads will be shown before your channels. When it’s time to show an ad, the algorithm brings in all the factors together and runs a bidding to determine which ad will be shown and automatically charges ad costs and revenue share.
The cherry on top, you can buy other people’s videos as ads. As in you can pay to YT, to show either your own or someone’s else videos before other people videos. Whole 10+ minute videos! if you wanted to.
Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.