My uncle once had a dentist tell him to come in three times a year instead of twice a year. He imagines a giant meeting of all dentists took place right before that and there was a speaker who said, “I know how you can make 50 percent more profit…”
I think YouTube just had that same meeting.
I was watching an Australian documentary on Great White Shark Attacks (hell yes!) when I noticed a little array of yellow boxes along the time bar. When the counter reached each bar, suddenly I had a new commercial that I could either watch or skip through after five seconds!
What is the manner of this trickery? I screamed, only less formally and with way more profanity. YouTube and I used to have a beautiful agreement: I watched five seconds of the world’s most obnoxious commercial about CariDee and her godd*mn psoriasis (or the new terrible one with the guy and the Lamborghini) and then YouTube left me alone for the length of a video, no matter how long.
Apparently, that’s no longer a thing. Now content is being parcelled into blocks and each block requires its own commercial. It’s like regular TV — the thing I watch YouTube to avoid!
Of course, there do seem to be some conditions:
?It only seems to affect long form content, is one of them. Shorter programs, like videos in the two-five minute range are unaffected and still hew to the one commercial per view rule.
?It mostly hasn’t hit actual YouTubers. None of the several assorted YouTube vlogger channels I checked out have multiple commercials, despite some of them having long form content as well.
?It hasn’t affected songs, even long ones like Inna Gadda Da Vita (that would really piss me off).
?It doesn’t matter the length of the program for commercial count. The shark one I was watching has at least seven commercials and clocks in at roughly 44 minutes, while a much longer UFO program is over and hour and only has three (four, if you count the damn CariDee psoriasis one at the beginning).
I’ve reached out to YouTube for some clarification as to what the extra commercials are about ($$$) and will of course let you know more ($$$) when we know more ($$$). In the meantime, I’ve got to keep my finger quick on the button to minimize the ad revenue they earn for these extra commercials. And until we find out there is a better and more compelling reason than “they’ll just make that much more money off of us,” I suggest you do the same. There’s no good reason at the moment that we should accept this new standard “just because.”
Oh, and here’s that Great White documentary if you’re interested … it’s pretty b*tchin’.
AdBlock is your friend.
@Youtube Guru I was just getting ready to say the same thing, our videos land usually between 10-20 minutes and I’ve got the option to put ads every 10 minutes if I wanted to. But I don’t because I value our viewers and don’t want to have view abandonment because of the high number of ads. Jeff you need to complain to NG Documentary if you don’t want them having ads throughout the content, not YouTube.
These are midroll ads…This ad type has been available on YouTube for over 4 years. Midroll ads can be placed on videos over 10 minutes at every 7 minute interval. YouTube does not automatically put these ads on creator’s videos. Creators must put these ads into their videos themselves in order to be live.
Sadly whoever wrote this article does not seem to know much about the YouTube ecosystem.