Youtube resorting to interruption ads in the first place was equivalent to Tesla deciding to ship each car with a small internal combustion engine bolted on.
Considering the strides Amazon and Netflix have made with original content, I think Youtube should be viewed as having missed the boat in a pretty big way. All of the promising platform innovations that seemed worth waiting for now seem to have been put on hold in favor of prioritizing Google's ad revenue maximization.
The biggest of these are "autoplay" and the silly way that it chooses content to play next.
There seems to be some notion that consumers want to sit in front of youtube and gaze at it while it plays some bizarre mix of low quality user generated content and videos that consumers have watched before, while interspersing annoying ads that encourage the user to tap/click to dismiss the ad.
It's hard to imagine an experience that creates more annoyance. It's as if a fly is released into the room at the start of each video that lands on your ear, and you must either put up with it or exert effort to get rid of it.
Regular TV commercials should be viewed simply as a result a near monopoly for years, with viewers having no choice but to suffer through ads, and advertisers having no choice but to overpay for them.
I actively avoid watching youtube for these reasons, and consider it (as a product) a lot like SourceForge -- someone just trying to milk every ad dollar possible with no concern for the quality of the experience.
I hope this article means that there has been an inflection point and YouTube cannot continue to increase revenue by emulating the dated paradigm of broadacast TV.
Facebook, it seems, has already eaten Google's lunch on live video.