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Vietnam bans unskippable ads

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Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#31

Post by echelon »

austin-cheney wrote: post #17
catapart wrote: post #14

Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds. And if your product is of any interest to me whatsoever, I'm happy to continue watching the ad. I sit through movie trailers and tech ads all the time, even with an option to skip. But I h…

> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. Why?

Second order effects.

Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.

All of these happen at the population level.

I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are probably bad for innovation and growth.

You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#32

Post by cm2012 »

pif wrote: post #21
cm2012 wrote: post #2

Basically banning brand advertising ads. Interesting. This will be a pain for a bunch of developers to adhere to lol.

> Basically banning brand advertising ads. I don't get it. Could you please elaborate? Thanks in advance!

In marketing their is a distinction between direct response ads (get people to take action) vs brand ads (force people to just watch, no immediate action needed).

Unskippable ads are almost always brand ads focusing on total view time.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#33

Post by toomuchtodo »

nickff wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, just keep pulling the policy ratchet if tech tries to subvert.

It likely wouldn't take much to get YouTube to just shut out Vietnam; ads there are very cheap, so they probably weren't making much money anyway.

Minimal loss, the content can still be ripped and shared through other systems. Youtube is adversarial S3 imho. We can collectively live without Google and Youtube, without getting into the slop argument. I would take a different perspective about social contract if Google did not do Google things, and try to squeeze its users as hard as possible.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#34

Post by senkora »

Spivak wrote: post #12
llbbdd wrote: post #6

Poorly thought out and family subscription to YouTube premium in Vietnam is $6/month USD. Google is just going to pull a different lever to compensate, like just displaying more shorter ads per session.

I don't think Google's gonna be hurting for this one given the fact that hitting the skip button gives Google a strong signal that a real human just watched the ad and it didn't just play to an empty room.

Yep. Ad viewability standards simply require that a video ad was 50% onscreen for a continuous 2 seconds in order for it to count as an impression. Google probably usually gets that even for skippable ads.

> Picture this: an advertiser pays premium rates for space on your site, but their carefully crafted creative sits unseen at the bottom of a page your readers never scroll to. Despite technically delivering the impression you promised, you've essentially sold empty air. This disconnect between ads served and ads seen is why viewability has emerged as the cornerstone metric in digital advertising's maturity.

> Video ads require at least two seconds of continuous play while 50% visible ... These seemingly arbitrary thresholds represent extensive research into human attention patterns.

https://www.playwire.com/blog/ad-viewability

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#35

Post by spencerflem »

iammjm wrote: post #24
_jab wrote: post #13

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present. Don't…

The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.

And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.

We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#37

Post by MichaelZuo »

cm2012 wrote: post #27
austin-cheney wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. Why?

Its market distortionary and makes global advertisers have to customize for the local audience, some might not bother

Isn’t that presumably the point of the Vietnamese government whenever they set new requirements?

To make it harder for people who dont care about Vietnam to do business.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#38

Post by matthewfcarlson »

dylan604 wrote: post #20
catapart wrote: post #14

Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds. And if your product is of any interest to me whatsoever, I'm happy to continue watching the ad. I sit through movie trailers and tech ads all the time, even with an option to skip. But I h…

I'm much less concerned about being sold in 15-30 secs as much as the "ads" that are paid promotional programming that runs >30 minutes in the middle of a video that is <30 minutes.

Nothing makes me quite as irrationally angry as a 30 second ad on a one minute video

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#39

Post by wrsh07 »

glimshe wrote: post #22

They shouldn't be surprised if ads are shown more often.

Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as you say)

I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#40

Post by mjamesaustin »

cm2012 wrote: post #27
austin-cheney wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. Why?

Its market distortionary and makes global advertisers have to customize for the local audience, some might not bother

Ad skipping should be handled at the platform level and not left to individual advertisers to control. Regulations like this make such an outcome more likely.

Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.

Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads, but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.

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