this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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I'll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people's faces that don't want see them and so little making ads more attractive.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.
Forced ads with mandatory 5sec isn't making people interested in your product, heck, numerous times I might have been interested in a product, but lost interested since I couldn't rewind the ad or because the ad didn't link to anything that gave me further information. A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.
Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.
Ads got too aggressive, people made adblockers, ads got more aggressive because of lost revenue, almost everyone starts using adblockers.
They did it to themselves, people were content with simple ads on a page, it's once they started interfering with the content and access of it that they became a problem.
I never had an issue with YT's 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
Yeah and I wouldn’t even mind like 5 minutes of ads at the beginning compared to randomly dispersed in the middle
Oh sure, let me watch 5 MINUTES before watching a 7min clip.
Dedicated 5min are only marginally justified if the content is >60 minutes in length.
Screw that much. I'll give them 1 second per 5 minutes of video.
I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I'm pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn't worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.
Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation
I wouldn't apply Twitch's situation to YouTube, IF it's even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.
It doesn't seem to me a given that they'd boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying "Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷". It's easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.
Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn't figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn't they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it's user data. Maybe it's the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn't be hosting it. It wouldn't make sense.
But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It's just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It's not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.
Interest rates have been low enough for long enough that many companies have been running on the "fake it 'til you make it" philosophy forever. Air BnB, Door Dash, Lyft, and countless others have never been profitable. But they survive by constantly taking out loans and collecting new investor money to increase their market share (the infinite growth scheme), hoping that they'll either eventually have enough impetus to monopolize a market and bully it into being profitable, or get bought up by Google and co for a rich payout.
This is how YouTube and Netflix got profitable. They ran at a loss until they were popular enough to turn a profit, and then switched to maximizing that profit. I imagine the same is true for the big social media sites as well. Run at a loss until you have a big enough userbase to attract advertisers. And this is exactly why Tumblr was never profitable and Verizon basically killed it trying to make it profitable. Tumblr's population has always been the groups advertisers like the least - minorities, LGBTQ groups, sex workers, and artists/creatives. So Verizon tried to sanitize it by purging them to make it attractive to advertisers, and consequently killed the userbase that gave it it's potential for ad profits in the process.
I see what you are saying, but Google is still not bleeding money and YouTube has become very well established already. In fact, for years YouTube contributes to Google's primary revenue source: Advertising. Of course, this is why they are opposed to ad blockers, that much makes perfect sense.
But I don't see any indication that it's not making ends meet. And I'm not taking an executive's word as proof, much less one from a whole different company. It's expected that they will say whatever make their actions look good, whether or not it's true.
Yeah, I don't mean that YouTube is unprofitable. It's probably hugely profitable, and now they're focusing on maximizing that profit.
But with something like Twitch, which claims to have been unprofitable for a decade or more, I can believe that simply because of the low interest rates that allow them to perpetually keep burning money and that the value of these platforms is measured by the potential profit from the userbase - whether through ad revenue, data, or something else - rather than the money they're making right now. This is why Verizon bought Tumblr for like a billion dollars or whatever. That was the estimated value of the company, despite it never turning a profit, simply based on the potential revenue from its userbase. It's also why Verizon ended up selling Tumblr for like 1% of what they paid for it 3 years later. Because they ran off that userbase and the rest weren't deemed valuable for advertisers.
That was the initially when YouTube was created. Everyone knows that Google has no problem cancelling anything that's not profitable.
If it was profitable, then why did google stop posting the financial statistics for YouTube
to get the benefit of the doubt on unpopular decisions. Same thing with hiding thumbs down counter from videos.
If they want to, they can go 100% paywalled. But I guess people like to conveniently forget that YouTube wants to double-dip.
That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.
Plus nearly all advertising is insultingly stupid as to appeal to idiots.
Most ads are about brand recognition and not so much about trying to sell a specific product. Even if you think an ad is stupid, if you still can remember the brand then the ad worked.
That generally just makes me remember not to use that product or service because the ad was so annoyingly stupid
No, it didn't as brand recognition is desirable only if positive.
I find it extremely funny that YouTube serving ads also strains the same video infrastructure they're trying to increase revenue on.
Yeah the last ad I remember seeing was for a movie, that actually looked interesting. But rather than tell me the name in the first 10 or 20 seconds they wanted me to watch to the end before revealing. So I skipped straight out of that.
They used to have a popup that told you the movie title and they took that away, so now they get a skip. If I am actually interested, I just google the actor I recognize.
Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don't, so why don't tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?
"MORE!" - already wealthy people.
But they just get less money from me, because I remove all non organic ads. Would non organic ads be less annoying, they could sell more shit to me.
We are the more aware portion of the public.
Take a look at public linear tv for a while during prime time.
Ad breaks every 30min with a cliffhanger in the movie.
Atrocious.
Paying attention to your needs/desires takes work. They don't want to work, they just want, "MORE!"
Not really, they are clearly spending money and resources to grab my attention and it's not like the work is done by people who are profiting in the end anyway. Than again - I'm rather anti consume to begin with, so maybe people like me are not a valuable market to beginn with, which is fair.
Which, strangely, was in fact the entirety of my point.
I'd much much much rather watch ads for products that are not the least relevant to me. I'm not going to be an active participant in my own manipulation. I'd rather be annoyed.
Youtube doesnt make money with the youtuber reviewing the product.
Yes, but that's self inflicted. They make the rules. They build the software. They decide how ads are presented.
They sure are.
Those creators drive the traffic to the page.
Which only has value to the corporation if the people driven there watch ads on said page.
I doubt so - Sponsorblock exists. I guess some don't mind it because it supports the creators they like directly.
I don't mean the sponsor segments, but the rest of the video. LTT, MKBHD and all the other tech channels, every movie and game reviewer and a lot of other stuff is all ads. Every single channel that is focused on showing you a new product is effectively an ad. And people watch it because they are interesting in seeing what new or interesting products are out there. There is no aversion to ads, there is an aversion to bad and annoying ads.
True. But probably that money does not go to Google but to the Youtuber directly, so for Google this is still a cost.
money
Also, disappointingly, most people don't care about the ad all that much.
Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.
The good sites put effort in to curate their ads and make sure they are things their audiences would enjoy. Lots of webcomics STILL have blog posts about doing this. Same with one of the more popular "steam deck" websites.
The problem is that this doesn't work. Because people don't permitlist those sites. They just block everything for the exact same reasons "I pirate it and if I like it I'll buy it" was always a blatant lie for the vast majority of people (and no, I don't care who consider themselves exceptions to that).
So when curated and "good" ads have almost zero benefit over shitty and obnoxious ones? The focus stops being "let's serve good ads and trust our users to have our backs" and more "What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?"
When? "Will it Blend?" is about the only time I can think of when a company went in an alternative direction and turned their ads into entertainment and was quite successful at that. How many products do even have as little as an official unboxing video? Stuff like the SteamDeck teardown is what I would love every company doing for all their product. But it's super rare. Why limit your ads to 30sec fake nonsense when you could have 15min of talking about your product in detail?
There wouldn't be a need or even the ability to block anything if it wouldn't be forced on the user. If Youtube had a "show me a random ad" button, I'd click it. I don't hate ads. I hate bad ads that are forced in my face when I don't need them. I have plenty of downtime where I wouldn't mind seeing what new products are around. Gameify that stuff. Make it interesting. Make it explorable. Make it interactive. You have million dollar budget, mountains of collected data and random garbage forced into the users face is the best you can come up with?
You are forgetting that there is an advertiser in all this. People that care about getting clicks on ads will have no problem tricking users into accidentally clicking on ads. But why are the advertisers themselves ok with that? If I want to advertise a product I'd not be interested in paying for accidental clicks users were tricked into, I'd be interested in finding users that are interested in the product I want to sell. And I really don't see current ads doing that very well. They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don't see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.
Let's break that down
I mean, if your goal is for the ads to be entertaining, people REALLY liked Chuck (high concentration of chuds aside) and Community. And Soap Operas literally came out of the idea of integrating advertisements into media.
Also... it is not just a meme that people are increasingly more interested in the ads than the stoppages during the Super Bowl.
Also, this was a driving force behind Flash. Ads that were "games".
But my point is more the efforts to make less obtrusive ads that are visually appealing AND relevant to the viewers.
Sorry. You are talking about wanting 15 minute pre-roll ads? Do you want to maybe rethink that? Please. I beg you. Don't put that evil into the world.
Also: What you are describing is literally an infomercial. Ron Popeil's rotisserie oven and bigass syringe come to mind, but also Vince "I got my ass beat by a prostitute" Offer and Billy "Never met anything I didn't want to snort" Mays (RIP) come to mind.
Also... with a word from our sponsor, we have Linus "I can't have a warranty because people would attack my family" Sebastien and LMG. Or any other heavily sponsored review channel. And... people run "sponsor block". While watching a fucking ad for the latest Samsung phone.
This is right up there with "I'll buy it if I like it after I fully watch all twelve seasons". Sure there are people who would willingly watch ten ads per hour if it meant that others didn't have to see any. Uhm... Okay, I actually can't even pretend that is true.
Or, to be slightly less mocking: Subscription models. Those have proven to be incredibly lucrative to people who "made it big" already. They are a constant struggle for up and comers. Because I would probably throw a few bucks at J Kenji Lopez-Alt every month if it got me a steady feed of recipes and videos. As much as I like him, I can't see myself doing that for Ethan Chlebowski because he is still nowhere near as established and is very much a "home cook" in terms of "knowledge".
Because, trust me, all your favorite content creators would love it if they didn't need to do any sponsored content or negotiate with brands/marketing firms and just got a giant check in the mail every week from their fans. Very few can pull that off to the degree required to make "quality" content. Otherwise nobody would have ever heard of Raid Shadow Legends and Better Help.
Or, if I can move to the greater root problem of "how to make money while making media", let's look at video games. Some of the pseudo-live games will have a LOT of DLC. Like literally hundreds of cosmetic skins that have no bearing whatsoever on the gameplay and exist almost entirely as a "tip jar" to fund the free content updates. And... people lose their mind. And they use it as an argument that the game is bad because if you wanted to buy all 500 skins for your player character in an FPS that has been getting steady updates for 4 years now, it would cost you 300 dollars. THE HORROR. FUCK LAZY DEVS!!!
Again, see the entire concept of sponsored media
Because advertisement works.
A few years back, one of the WWE shows basically ran an ad for "fuck time island" or whatever it was called every single commercial break. It was some sort of reality dating show or whatever. And you could watch in real time as the squaredcircle crowd started off by complaining and mocking and very rapidly changed their rules so they could have a discussion thread on it every single week where people were actually interested.
Or just think about how many times people have muttered 'eat fresh" while reading up on public transit in many cities.
Again. Attempts have been made for literally decades. Sites curated really quality ads and people still ran adblock. Youtubers try to work with good companies for their sponsorships and people still run sponsor block. Hell, people often won't even click the affiliate link to buy the product they just watched a 30 minute review of. The "better" way is something that people either haven't blocked yet or can't block.