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YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

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Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#31

Post by freehunter »

toastedzergling wrote: post #2

Youtube wasn't the breaking point for me, twitch.tv was. Granted, the streamers themselves do have control over this, I found it utterly annoying to see the same 1 or 2 ads played over and over in my face. Once I had ABP installed, the whole internet suddenly became faster to load too. The only annoying thing is, some websites that have those annoying ads that scroll across the webpage will now result in a dead-ifram…

Not just faster, but more secure as well. I couldn't tell you how many malware outbreaks I see at work because of a rogue advertisement on a popular site. Adblock keeps these from getting the best of your users. We did a pilot group with some folks who commonly use their work computers without the benefit of our corporate proxy or firewall (these are the users most at risk of advertising-based malware) by having them install Adblock. The results were pretty drastic, even if it wasn't a statistically significant sample size.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#32

Post by alextingle »

VikingCoder wrote: post #8
ancarda wrote: post #5

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.…

Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video? And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?

That's only possible because they have very sensibly decided to avoid that arms race. Why? Because ultimately, the ad is playing on my monitor, linked to my computer, running my browser on my OS. All that stuff is under my control. If I really don't want to see ads, and yet want them to think I'm seeing ads, then I can.

I have seen people put stickers on their monitors over where the ads are... How are they going to detect that?

I'm sure they feel it's much better to be able to tell when people are blocking ads (and therefore not charge for impressions), than it would be to try and force me to watch ads, when I've already demonstrated that I'm willing to do what it takes to block them.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#33

Post by masklinn »

VikingCoder wrote: post #8
ancarda wrote: post #5

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.…

Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video? And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?

> Aren't most pre-rolls 3 seconds before you can watch the video?

5. But it's only "most", and it's more and more common to find videos where you get 30 seconds unskippable.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#34

Post by magikbum »

ancarda wrote: post #5

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.…

Why is everyone so whiny? Should everything be free in life? In a time when PBS's budget is drastically cut I am glad free content still makes it out and I am happy to support it. No one is forced to watch ads.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#35

Post by 001sky »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #28
bittercynic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Greed.

I work in a sort of purgatory of the broadcast/internet TV space, and with regards to ads, completely agree. Broadcasters have gotten accustomed to very high rates for the ads shown on television. They're trying to get these rates on the web, but advertisers don't want to pay them (which is crazy, since you can directly measure response on the web; not as much with broadcast). So they show more ads. A lot more ads, t…

Entitlement. You have to remember that old media is a monopoly biz. That explains alot about the culture. The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power/money/presitge in society. Its not surprising they are masters of political interventions to support their positions. They don't do product as much as they do monopoly business model, legislated advantage(s) and regulatory capture. From that position, it's just extraction by contract terms.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#36

Post by cromwellian »

Ads are the least bad option. The Web functions best if content is available without paywalls. The Web is about friction-free use, you click a link, you are faced with walls. If we went to a micro-transaction based Web, where every link was behind a payment service, it would destroy crawlability, hamper sharing, and cast a chilling effect on people's behavior with respect to consuming content.

The people producing content do need to eat and datacenters cost money too. You can either turn the entire Web into a giant App Store Mall where you pay for everything on demand, or we can have a free, open web, where 'curl' works, but you have to suffer the annoyance of banner ads and profiling (which people can do anyway with paywalls anyway)

To me, it's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'd rather not see the Web behind a bazillion freemium pay-me links like we have on native.

The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant, more pleasant, and let those who don't want to make the tradeoff make a micro-payment instead to opt-out of ads.

If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#37

Post by isomorphic »

ancarda wrote: post #5

Websites are expensive and other than charging users money, ads are an easy way to generate revenue. I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock. However, YouTube forced me to. Back when YouTube used a small ad in the top-right, it was fine. Banner overlays were a bit more annoying, but still tolerable. Pre-rolls? No way, they stop me from getting to the content I want.…

  I like using free services and I'd like to support the owner. As such, I don't use AdBlock.
I remember years ago when Ars Technica ran the article "Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love":

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-d...

So I disabled AdBlock on Ars Technica. I was immediately greeted with a horrible blinking ad claiming some nonsense that was completely insulting--the IT equivalent of those "punch the monkey" ads. I turned AdBlock back on. I've never turned it back off on Ars Technica.

Websites that run advertising cannot pretend that advertising is somehow separate from the site. Advertising becomes part of the content. Ads are therefore representative of the site. Website owners should curate the ads as carefully as the site's main content. Otherwise they're committing some of the same sins as spammers.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#38

Post by DanBC »

a3n wrote: post #4

I didn't realize adblock would block pre-rolls. That damn web development company with the animated little guy and the tiles of site examples has really gotten annoying. Installed adblock a few minutes ago. Bliss.

YOU'VE BEEN CODING LIKE A BEAST AND NOW IT'S [skip]

It's weird that there's no mechanism for me to veto ads. I have no use for that service, which makes the ad even more annoying to me. A while ago Crucial RAM were showing a really irritating ad.

Normally I don't skip ads, but there have started being more ads that I hate and need to skip.

And it's weird to get a 4 minute pre-roll ad on a 9 minute youtube video.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#39

Post by varelse »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #13
marquis wrote: post #11

There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money than less popular, as expected. Someone comes up with an idea to make money off the stuff by giving it away for free but putting some ads on it. People don't mind much: the stuff is free now and the people making popular stuff make good money from their share of the…

> The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. greed

Also spelled Wall Street. And if at any point you come under the delusion that Wall Street is of any benefit to anyone but themselves, go read some analyst's alternate reality review and recommendations for a technology/company you understand top to bottom as an engineer. It's a terrifying Morlock/Eloi dichotomy that explains a lot (at least to me).

Add in blind allocation at Google and they themselves are doing their very best to hire smart people who have no passion whatsoever for the job they're doing, staying only for the compensation and perks, perhaps fleetingly hoping that one day they can transfer to a fun project they believe in.

Re: YouTube Shoots Google in Foot, Publishers Suffer Collateral Damage

#40

Post by wnevets »

When will advertisers realize shorter and more direct ads work best on the web?

When Hulu was in beta they only had 5 second ads and I still remember some of them after all of these years simply because I had no reason to direct my attention away from them. Now when Im forced to watch a 30 second ad I just change the tab and check my email or whatever.

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