YouTube Advertising

Along with everyone else, I’ve been watching more streaming videos on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and of course, YouTube. YouTube was purchased by Google a few years ago for a lot of money, and they really need to monetize the platform to make some of that money back. I’m not sure how successful their paid model works but since it’s Google, they also have lots of advertising. Before, it was maybe one video ad before the actual video you’re watching, but now it seems to be at least two ads, then more ads randomly interspersed in the video. The increase in ad quantity is very noticeable and they often come at the worst time. At least on TV there are designated ad break times so the flow of the show still works.

On my PC’s, I typically use Chrome as the browser. There is a plug-in for Chrome called Adblocker for YouTube that works very well in blocking ads. On iPhones and iPads, if you run the YouTube app, there is no ad blocker available. I think you can run YouTube from a browser but iOS devices always try to run the corresponding app instead from a browser. I also have an YouTube app installed on my Samsung Smart TV. It’s convenient since you can control the app from your TV remote but here, there is also no ad blocker. I’ve attached a cheap Chromebox to the TV and can actually run YouTube in Chrome instead. I’m feeling the ads are intrusive enough that I’m going to start avoid using the TV app and use Chrome instead.

I understand they need to make some money, though I feel Google grossly overpaid for YouTube. It’s really their own problem that hey need to recoup some of the $2 billion they spent. Again, some ads are okay but once you start spamming and affecting the viewing experience, people are going to find ways around it and here we are.

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Also, the longer the video, the more ads you can insert. At 10 minutes, YouTube allows you to insert ads in the middle of videos instead of just at the beginning. If you look around YouTube, you will see a ton of videos that are 10:01 long. This is when content creators stretch a 6-7 minute video to just over 10 minutes in an attempt to grab more advertising money. It’s also noticeable when you watch the video because it’s painfully obvious there are lots of crappy content inserted just to make the video longer.