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Ask HN: Is it just me or has YouTube gone fanatical on ads?

by sarreph·12y ago·121 comments·view on hn ↗
I never used to have a problem watching the first 5 seconds of a sponsored commercial on some of the more popular YouTube videos, but I've noticed a startling increase in the amount of ads being served to me. It is at the point where I would say 3 in every 4 videos plays an ad now. It's disgustingly frustrating.

Has anyone else noticed this?

If so, has there been an announcement regarding this that I've missed? Perhaps even something to do with Google+ IDs being used for user accounts?

121 comments
I don't know why it did't happen sooner. I started pre-roll seeing ads on mobile as well, which I don't remember until recently.

I don't get why it's disgusting. This is how video creators and Google are supposed to get paid. It's annoying to me that people want free content, and they keep pushing companies to "get traction first, then monetize". This is what has to happen, or else Google has to keep subsidizing progressively larger bandwidth bills - and the people who are creating the content have to keep their day jobs.

I personally have no problem with including ads with YouTube content- it was always going to end that way.

The problem is the fact you have to 'pay' before you get to play. When a FTA tv puts on a movie, they give you 10-15 minutes of content to hook you into he movie, then ramp up the ads toward the end, knowing hor going to stick around to see the end.

YouTube != TV movies, but it feels like you have to watch all the superbowl ads upfront before a player takes the field. When you're speculatively flicking through YouTube videos looking for the right one, it degrades the experience when you have to go through the ad process before even committing to watching even 10% of the video.

So to me it would be better if the ad cut in during the frat x seconds of the video. The video owner could pick a break-point when editing so the more pro channels could properly cut to an ad-break, and the viewers could could set through the dross to find the one without the cheesy music and graphic overlays or terrible quality.

To me they are annoying because they disallow you to skip them for the first few seconds. Their targeting also doesn't do a very good job.

But let me tell you the real problem with YouTube ads. Recently in my country there has been a public outcry against a mining project, which is dangerous not only because of ecological reasons, but also because it needs special laws that trump our constitutional rights and the whole deal is filled with documented corruption. Movies started popping on Youtube describing the perils of open-pit gold mining with cyanide.

Well guess what, the company behind the project started displaying ads on every one of those clips, showing local poor villagers crying for "jobs", with one of the big fat lies of the project being that it will create plenty of jobs. It won't of course, but that's besides the point.

The point is, say somebody believes in something and posts a video on YouTube. A company or an individual can always display ads right at the start of that clip in disagreement and there's no way in hell that you can stop it. If you report it, what are you going to report it for? Now, I believe in freedom of speech, but that's just immoral, as freedom of speech doesn't imply forcing your opposition to present your case in their argument. And it's not freedom of speech when your opposition is a multi-national with all the money it needs to buy whatever it wants.

So that's why YouTube ads are immoral. Because they are more intrusive than normal ads and can be used for disinformation. And because I don't use AdBlock, I limit my visits to YouTube. I used to use it for listening to music, but there are much better options for that.

What I don't get from such services ... maybe I'm willing to pay a monthly subscription. That's what I do with Google Apps. Why not give me the option to turn those ads off?

It's pretty obvious why it didn't happen before... There were still competition.

Google is following Microsoft 90s playbook for a decade now.

Here's one example use case where the ads are horrible: playlists.

Youtube has these "top tracks" playlists. When I discover a new artist, I'll often put that on and go do something else.

If a rollover ad comes on, I have to come back to the computer, and click the "skip" button, since I'm not sitting down.

One thing I was wondering: does the content creator make money when I skip the ad, or only when I take some kind of action based on it?

I guess it's just annoying that it's practically on everything now... like everyone is trying to make that 4 cents in ad revenue off of their kitten rolling around or whatever lol ><

I've personally stopped watching several videos just because an ad started (as in I closed the browser tab after seeing I had to wait 15s or 30s). Youtube still has dominance now but if you keep getting in the way of people, something better will come along and usurp you (ie StackOverflow vs Experts Exchange).

I'd rather pay a monthly subscription to YouTube than see the amount of ads they show. Instead I've installed AdBlock. Now they get 0 revenue from me.

Games on app stores have figured this out: many of them have "Ad supported" or "Paid" versions. Why can't Google?

It's annoying because google has done the worst possible thing and put ads in front of every video because you even decide to watch it. It totally breaks the point of being able to browse selections of video if you can't do it without seeing an ad every time.

Google really needs to leverage all the screen real-estate on youtube or take advantage of the active video discovery process of its users. Youtube shouldn't just be a TV where ads are pushed every x minutes or every video like clockwork.

I don't have a problem with their ads either. What I do have a problem with is that the videos sometime load really slow while the ads are always lightning fast :P
Edit: Found the article, here it is http://socialtimes.com/youtube-pre-roll-ads-drive-users-inst...

Can't find the article now, but I recently read that the Youtube ads getting more obnoxious is hurting a lot of small advertizers and sites. Because of the annoyance, even many non tech people are increasingly looking for solutions and installing ad blocks, which block all ads and not just Youtube's. Google can get around this somewhat by paying Adblock Plus to unblock it's own text ads, but a number of small fish cannot.

Previous discussion of Youtube ads on Reddit here. http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/18m95j/has_anyo...

In short yes there are more ads, but it's actually not anything that new. Let me explain..

Around summer 2007 (when I started using YouTube myself) YouTube started its beta version of the "partner program" where they salaried somewhere a bunch of people for a year and monetized their videos. In about Dec 2007 they let anyone apply for the program doing the rev share on videos we see today. I myself became a partner around March 2008. Anyway until about May 2011 the program ran like this, you applied, waited months normally for a reply, and hopefully got accepted, or if rejected tried again and waited..... In May 2011 they started trailing out a program where accounts in good standing could monetize videos w/o ever applying for partner, launching the start of the "monetization" program. In about March 2012 they basically killed off the apply for partner program and replaced it with this where basically everyone on YouTube was a partner. It's been since then that any video COULD be monetized, its just as time has gone on more and more people actually monetized them.

My dates may be slightly off as its thanksgiving evening and I'm doing this off the top of my head but thats basically how things have gone. It's really nothing new...

FYI I run a website that reports YouTube & Twitch statistics called Social Blade so youtube data is something I've been watching for quite a while now. Hope that helps :)

The problem I have is the really shitty targeting. With as much as Google must know about me, their ads usually are about stuff I have absolutely no interest in.

I am from smaller country, so I get that the pool of advertisers must be smaller too.

I bought a new bike this year and religiously researched this topic and consumed a ton of cycling videos. What ads do I see? Cars. I don't have a driver's license.

Facebook isn't any better. Last year I was in South Korea and logged into Facebook once. After my return, FB managed to exclusively display ads in Korean for over a month.

Then there are the occasions where you research a topic, buy a product, and then get to see ads for the product you already bought for a year after (I saw ads for the NI Maschine midi controller for over a year after my purchase).

I worked on the YouTube ads team (Adsense for interactive media, or AFIM) for a while.

The people on that team saw themselves as helping to create the replacement for TV, and part of that job was to create a model that paid the expense of hosting and distributing video, with all the associated infrastructure, as well as allowed for content-creators to make money--basically to make it a viable business. Ads are the primary means of making that happen, but they've experimented with other methods too.

They care a lot about the user. To contradict another poster, they don't show ads at every opportunity; that's not the Google way, and they have detailed data on exactly how many ads you can show people before they stop watching videos. They also strongly encourage advertisers to use skippable ads--they make users happier and they encourage more interesting ads (it's also not entirely true that advertisers don't have to pay for skipped ads).

The only thing worse than YouTube ads are the non-Google attempts at video ads. Google's UI and targeting are 10x better than the competition I've seen.

(It's been over a year since I've worked on AFIM, so my info could be out of date.)

The net is soooo ripe for a distributed replacement of Youtube, Facebook, Gmail, etc. Once upon a time those sorts of sites provided real value in hosting files, pictures, video and providing a well-known endpoint like gmail.

But now we have phones with 64GB of flash for canonical storing of files, p2p protocols for efficient transfer of files and distributed hash tables for finding files. Someone is going to come along with a distributed system that gains enough traction and just wipe all of these guys off the map.

To paraphrase the founder of RedHat, whatever comes next won't be the size of Youtube, it will make youtube the size of a bittorrent tracker.

Frustrating yes. Disgusting no. YouTube is provided to you as a free service and advertisers pickup the tab.

Google paid over $1B for YouTube and people upload over 10 new hours of video every minute. Did you honestly expect they'd wear that kind of expense for ever?

It's totally obnoxious now and destroys usability. I was on a slow internet for a while and youtube mercilessly shoved ads on it. It was impossible to use. I found Youtube center and it smoothed the experience, allows me to disable ads and download video easily.

I also got it on the faster connection. It really makes life better. I'm willing to pay a few bucks to never see ads. Until that's an option youtube and deserving content creators will lose a few bucks.

Oh well. Just won't tolerate the current volume of ads.

I've found that YouTube ramps up ad volume as you increase your viewing. I can do a short session of a video or two (5minutes) without any. But if I increase that to long form content or longer session then ads seem to get center stage.
Users enable ads on their account I believe. If people are choosing to monetize their videos, thats going to happen more and more.
The problem is that most people go to YouTube for quick content. It becomes useless when you have to stop 3 out of 4 times for 5-30 seconds, as OP pointed out. It completely changes the YouTube experience and just doesn't feel "right" or scalable as a business model.

Or, if Google sticks to it then the sort of content that gets consumed might change. I already find myself skipping to see videos under 2 minutes if there's an ad before.

I never felt pushed around by ads on Netflix, South Park or any other premium content though.

I can confirm that.

It also used to skip pre-rolls when you reloaded the page, now it will keep displaying the pre-roll until you watch it.

Compared to hulu and others they haven't yet but it is more pervasive.

The 'skip' link is still in after you watch one longer ad in a series. At least they have that because watching ads for online videos is not the same as TV.

Back in the day on TV you'd get 10-15 minutes of entertainment before a commercial. Here you are watching :30 spots for another minute long video or maybe a few minutes on most occasions. So ad sites really need to take that into consideration.

Noone wants to watch more ad time than actual video time, keep at least a sane balance. A balance that will keep people watching not turn them away forever.

I have definitely noticed this too. It also brought to my attention how much I use YouTube as I noticed how often I felt pissed because of yet another pre-roll.
If you freely give Google access to display ads on your computer, they will do so at every opportunity until you can not take it any more.

The obvious method to prevent this is to deny Google free access to your hardware, and thus stop their efforts at displaying ads to you. Alternative, one could stop interacting with Google altogether, but thats a bit more drastic step.

I don't see any problem with it. Google are providing a free service to everyone (brands, content curators and those who consume it), why shouldn't they monetise that asset? A site like Youtube consumes so much bandwidth and space on a scale most people cannot imagine.

I am surprised the whole ad strategy wasn't rolled out a lot sooner.

In Chrome, I use Magic Actions for YouTube. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magic-actions-for-....

Not only it blocks ads, it removes annoying annotations as well.

Glad I am not the only one. In the last week or so I've noticed increase in ads as well. It's really annoying now, I frequently just skip watching video all together, I have a short attention span for this nonsense. 30 second ad so I can watch 1 minute video, no thank you.
Does youtube do anything smart around showing the same ads multiple times?

I watch a fair bit on twitch who don't have a lot of ads targeted at Australia. I think they do the advertiser and the viewer a disservice by repeating the same ad over and over again.

Say for example they are running an xbox one ad, after I have seen it for the 10th time in say a week I think it has really reached the maximum effectiveness that it is ever going to on me, showing it more is likely just blowing Microsoft's money.

We have a platform where everything can be precisely measured but the advertising is being shown like the traditional TV medium where there was no way to track how many times something was view by each viewer.

It's important to remember that the ads you're shown on Youtube videos are controlled by the channel owner, not by Google. Youtube itself doesn't have much control over how many ads you see.
Skipping ads is so ingrained in us, YouTube has now taught my 6 year old daughter to skip ads. She was not doing that 2-3 months back. But now she does it and she does not even need help doing it.
I noticed this recently as well. I had not seen any ads for a long time as I use AdBlock and AdBlockPlus for Chrome but they have started slipping through in the past few weeks.
It is not me. Here it is like 1 in every 10 or more videos, chances are when I continue to watch videos there could be no ads. Actually, some ads I really like that I want to replay.

It is not like in Chinese Youtube-alike online video sites, like Youku, Letv, they have 30 - 60 seconds ads in every beginning of a video, and there was no chance to "skip" the ads, even I use Adblock, it MAY be block the contents but never the ad itself.

It would be interesting to try some new ideas that advertising over the internet allows. How about an option for users to consume a few minutes of commercials in a row, and then get X number of videos ad free? Or allowing users to influence the ad selection by manually entering an interest/disinterest list.

Could be alot more flexible than the television model.

I feel your pain, bro. Lately I've been using http://fixyt.com which is a website that works on top of YouTube but without the annoying ads and without the stalking that Google does on you.
Incidentally, I find that having a "skip" button available to me actually makes me more interested in the commercial, because I have to make an active decision about whether to watch it or not.
Just today I started noticing this, yes. It's driving me insane.
I noticed the same thing the other day. The ads I don't care about so much. I immediately notice a performance hit. The experience itself was degraded.
Unless they've changed things recently, you can always subscribe to channels and watch those videos on a smart TV. I don't see ads on that... yet.
Yep, noticed this annoying feature too, I guess its been there for a while but till now Adblock used to block it. Google has found a way to bypass it.
i have had a lot of problems with Ads. Ads used to be ok and not as bad as they are now. They are as bad as those pop ads that used to show up on websites. But no matter what argument is raised as to how good or bad ads are I will always use an Adblocker. And Yes Google+ has gone Fanatical with the Ads ever since they bought out YouTube and I am fed up with it.
If youtube will come with paid plan like 99$ for year without ads in videos,user surely go for that.
The worst is that they place stickies all over some videos that you now that to click to close.
Christmas marketing season?
Youtube doesn't show in-video ads from where i live. (Africa)
Do paid videos (like GoT and BrBa) have these ads?
AD BLOCK PLUS. You're welcome.