Ads Start Appearing on Some YouTube Videos
Posted on August 22, 2007
YouTube blogs that they have started running YouTube InVideo ads on some of the YouTube videos for "select partners."
Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that we've been working with select partners to improve YouTube's presentation of advertising on their videos in a manner that brings you creative, compelling content and should also increase revenue flow to artists and content owners.Google spent a long time trying to come up with this ad concept and it seems like they went for a concept that is fairly unobtrusive. The ads can easily be turned off and appear at the bottom of videos. A last100 post which says the YouTube ads "are not that bad" has screenshots of a few of the ads including an ad for The Simpsons movie that shows Homer chasing after a donut. The Homer donut ad can be seen on Madina Lake's "House of Cards" music video. The Crime Mob - Rock Yo Hips music video contains an ad from Warner Brothers. The YouTube ads start up 15 seconds into the video and take up the bottom 20% of the screen.So what's new? Today we're offering select partners the ability to incorporate YouTube InVideo ads into their content. These are animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you're interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you're in full control of your YouTube experience.
The San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times have more details about the YouTube ad concept. The comments on YouTube's post about the ads range from those grudgingly accepting the ads to outright annoyance.
Some people will tolerate the ads:
- jernov: "i personally don't like it that much, but it's better than an advertisement movie playing in front of the video you want to see, making you wait for the whole thing to start. i don't like it, but it could be worse."
- 123woow: "i think its a good idea people will see the advertisements more often and they cant really complain about it annoying them or being intrusive to the video because you can manually click it away easily. Good job YouTube"
- randiicom: "I'm okay with this, but eventually it would get boring. I wouldn't subscribe to anyone who does this, but it wouldn't stop me from watching one of their videos. It'd be great though to get money for the videos you've made."
- johnbrouwer1: "It wrecks your youtube video! Terrible TERRIBLE idea!"
- sjmaerz: "I knew the team at Google would find a way to screw this up. Goodbye, YouTube, it was fun while it lasted."
- splitforces: "gawd advertising is in everything now. first it wuz comerrcials in the middle of my shows and now the middle of my fav online videos. i shall unsubscribe to any1 who would do that."
- losereligionrem: "sounds dumb... if i wanted to see advertisement... i'd just watch tv..."