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I am in complete agreement with you Joe. And not only because this is a perfect illustration of the ToadTirade "Your Brand Is Not My Friend™"

What the Googlemeisters don't realize is that people use YouTube as quick hit entertainment, a fun way to waste 5 minutes. Now as another blogger (Bill Green of MakeTheLogoBigger) brought up the other day, there's a breaking point, somewhere around 3 minutes, where most people decide a YouTube video is too long for casual viewing.

Add another 30-60 seconds to the length of most videos and you'll have a lot more people tuning out.

Add any sort of marketing message and you've opened the door to a competitor who runs videos without any preroll.

Curious though-- how do you see YouTube making money?

Posted by: Tangerine Toad

Well, it's the lesser of two evils because the least evil (no ads) is a big evil for a business. They need a revenue model.

Do I like overlay ads? No. Do I dislike them less than prerolls? You bet (and those stats suggest that I'm not atypical).

It's interesting that they are putting them in specific commercial content, not user videos. I think that's smart. People are complaining - of course - but it will be interesting to see if that translates into people not using YouTube. I suspect it will be a small portion of users that do that.

Here's the big question regarding the conversation business: how do you make it profitable? I am sure that the folks at Google have talked about things like paid memberships, which would be a really tough sell.

So I don't love it, but I have nothing better to suggest to them.

Posted by: John Whiteside

I think this was inevitable. The ‘free server space to anyone on the planet with a video of their dog running in circles’ model couldn’t last forever. How would they pay for their bandwidth, (supposedly north of 1mm per month).

To TT's point, it's interesting though that YT has changed the way we tolerate things. We can just about stand :30 spots on TV, but on YT, we’ll give somone three minutes.

Just as long as the people in the video are doing something really dumb.

;-p

Posted by: makethelogobiger

Now that Toad agrees with me (I think this is the first time), I have to reverse my position completely and staunchly advocate these incredibly creative and evolved form of advertising.

In fact, I think we should cancel Cannes next year and just award the Grand Prix to the folks over at YouTube/Google/all the agencies jumping on the brandwagon.

Posted by: jJ

I could rant all day about this, but I won't. I do want to point something out, though. The fact that this new ad unit covers content and thus alters it has not gone unnoticed. I see a lot of objections to the commercial nature of the ads, but I also see a lot of 'How DARE you alter my content?!' And folks have a point there.

Regardless of legalities, regardless of implied contracts, regardless of YouTube's need to pay the bills, this may end up being an emotional decision as much as a rational one for people who don't like the ad format. And thus, you may see a significant number of the people who have posted videos on YouTube disappearing along with their videos.

Posted by: Tom Hespos

I'm with you thinking that this is at worst dumb and at best a necessarily evil.

I'm just surprised at what action Google has taken based on some pretty shady research ( "In tests, YouTube users had clicked on overlays five to 10 times more frequently than on banner ads that already appear on some YouTube pages".)

Not to mention that attaching the adjective "engaging" to this type of ad method devalues both the word and the expectation people have.

If you haven't already, I suggest reading the NY Times piece on this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/technology/22google.html?_r=1&em&ex=1187841600&en=af4b7dd42de4af87&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin

Posted by: rodica buzescu

I see a lot of objections to the commercial nature of the ads, but I also see a lot of 'How DARE you alter my content?!' And folks have a point there.

Except that the ads are only going to appear on videos whose creators have signed up with YouTube to allow them there, and are splitting the revenue.

Which was clearly stated in the announcement.

Posted by: John Whiteside

Thanks for having the courage to bash net darlings Google/YouTube, Joseph.

You've absolutely nailed it. To add, this is a page out of the TV networks' last gasp playbook - they are putting more and more similar pop-ups during TV programs. Sure, Tivo can't skip it, but it makes the viewing experience more painful.

You cannot interrupt consumers in the present/future of media. Period. Figure something else out.

Posted by: Bob Gilbreath

John's point regarding that this will be only for creators giving the thumbs up does carry some weight but what's missing with that is user experience. People are used to seeing what they want. They don't want it interrupted. That's not the format that they're used to. YouTube is a more personal experience, this decision can destroy that.

Plus, I bet soon they'll be weighing their heavy hand and make it more difficult for people to reject allowing ads on their material.

Posted by: Jonathan Trenn

And the dominos start to fall as Facebook joins in:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118783296519606151.html?mod=mm_media_marketing_hs_left

Posted by: makethelogobigger

I don't mean to sound like a crank here, but I find the surprise and horror being expressed really weird. These are businesses, folks. They exist to make money. Yes, it's in their interest to figure out revenue models that provide an optimum user experience and still pay the bills and turn a profit.

If you want to argue that YouTube's new approach doesn't fit the bill, fine, but if you're also saying they should just leave it alone... well, sorry, but did you think it was a charity? What's the alternative proposal? I think everyone would love to hear about something better.

(As for Facebook, hmm, now there's a surprise; a site gather mounds and mounds of personal information & now is going to use it to make money. Er, hello? What did anybody expect?)

Finally, the idea that consumers hate ads is really questionable. Consumers hate ads that bother them. But for all the complaints about various types of intrusive advertising, online and off, people have generally accepted it after a little squawking, to the point that advertising is to some degree our common cultural reference these days.

Personally, I don't think that's a good thing, but I can't pretend it's not so.

Posted by: John Whiteside

John - it's the sense of entitlement that comes as part of the package nowadays (I wrote about this in Life after the 30-second spot)

I'm not saying I agree with it, but it is what it is.

Look at the Nikon D80 influencer outreach or my recent experiment with the iPhone for an episode for example. Here you have so-called MARKETING people all up in arms about bloggers or podcasters attempting to monetize their efforts.

From a B2C standpoint i.e. consumers - it's more about psychology (and bad strategic planning) than anything else. As our children teach us, once you give you can't take back. The get big fast strategy, which only reveals its strings after the fact is fraught with challenges.

IMO, the only way to win is to be non-traditional - dare I say, through a bold mix of alternatives to TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING (I wish I could make the font BIGGER to emphasize my point)

From a B2B standpoint, it's just hypocrisy but I digress....

Posted by: jJ

Idea. Give each of the 51 million YT users the option to be advertised to or not. Those who prefer NOT to be advertised to (Me, for example) can pay an opt out fee of $1 a year. Worst case scenario for YT/Google... nobody wants to be advertised to and they make 51 million a year.

As it stands now, the worst case scenario is a mass exodus to other services that offer free video hosting/playing without ads or with intermittent mutable ads.

What will probably happen is that most people will put up with the stupid semi-transparent ads. It's sad but true.
But not me.

Posted by: Christian

"...people have generally accepted it after a little squawking, to the point that advertising is to some degree our common cultural reference these days."

Because they have no choice. And nobody is against recouping costs–it's the way brands go about it that's the issue here.

The whole world wide interweb experience thing was not supposed to be for brands to simply take their ad model from the holy trinity of TV, Print and Radio and slap it on the web. Anybody advising their clients and brands to do that deserves what they get. From a brand POV, that's the same old thing they've always done.

Smarter consumers will see through that and look for other content. Brands need to be better than that. Stop playing games with consumers, give people a place to hang out without ads, and I think they'd be rewarded with more brand loyalty in the end, but a lot of brands are not that patient. They want hits now. Traffic now. More viewers. Who doesn't. But some things take time.

Relationships, right?

There's time for the pitch later, right now, let me enjoy my three minutes of idiots running into walls-without your hard-sell logo.

Brands stuck in the TV-print-radio mindset are thinking advertising in its purest sense is the ONLY way to reach consumers, and at the same time they're also trying to hide the cost of that advertising, IN that messaging by letting ads enter the picture. Those two though are not the same thing, and it assumes that the advertising is getting through and working.

Why should the consumer care. As a user, a brand's cost of doing business is not my problem, but they're making it my problem when they plaster the same old ad format over boring content.

Why do people leave one social media site and always head for another, like the cool places, they get taken over. Why don't brands realize this? Stop thinking profit first, think COOL first, THEN the profits will follow.

I think ultimately, this rush to monetize will make some idiot one day take the pay-per-post model too far and get himself killed wearing a t-shirt with a Pepsi logo in some freak backyard accident, all in the name of getting noticed on YouTube.

Posted by: bg

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