Marketers: Can We Talk About YouTube Ads?
TL;DR YouTube ads are the worst advertising method ever created.
So now that I have boiled my entire thesis here down into one manageable bite, I will elaborate to those of you who have a larger attention span.
There are three reasons people moved from TV to internet for their entertainment. Free content, no ads every 15 minutes and viewers can watch whatever they want whenever they want. That trifecta of viewer first mentality disrupted a whole entrenched entertainment industry.
Then YouTube ads came along.
It was fine at first, an ad at the start and you had the ability to skip. Then it was you had to wait 5 seconds to skip. Then there were ads that you couldn't skip. Now there are ads that play during the video.
I cannot count how many times I have turned off a video because I cannot skip an ad. Does this mean I didn't really want to watch the video? Possibly. None the less, I would have watched the video if I did not get an ad or if it was skippable.
The YouTube ads that I cannot skip are always intensely annoying. Why would a brand want to be associated with annoying customers? There are numerous products and services I simply will never buy because of the ads. "Wish" is a prime example. I refuse to ever purchase anything from that website because of how annoying it is.
Another issue is how the monetization actually occurs. The company advertising only pays YouTube if the video is not skipped. if the viewer skips the video, the company does not pay. Obviously the unskippable ones are more expensive.
so every time you skip an ad, you are not telling YouTube "Hey I don't want to see this." You are telling YouTube "Hey show me more of these."
So if you are as sick of these ads as I am, do what I do.
Don't Skip Them.
By not skipping them, you are costing that company money. I am not saying watch the ad. I;m saying mute it, minimise it and do something else for that 30 seconds. The company has to pay for the ad even though you did not watch it.
Marketers. Please spend your budget on something less obtrusive and annoying and I may very well buy your product. If you insist on using YouTube, just know you will be wasting your money and I will make a point of not buying your product. I am not the only one.